


Hollow Outside

by GuardianKarenTerrier



Category: The Hollow (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Anxiety Attacks, Camping, Canon Continuation, Constant Surveillance, Demisexual Adam, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Illiteracy, It is not, Memory Loss, Multi, Paranoia, Polyamory, Separation Anxiety, Surveillance, Team Cohesion, Team as Family, at least that's what we're going with, is it paranoia if it's completely justified, this was supposed to be a quick thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2019-06-11 07:32:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 35,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15310512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GuardianKarenTerrier/pseuds/GuardianKarenTerrier
Summary: They've won the game. It's all over now, to their relief.That relief doesn't last long when they find themselves catapulted from one trap to another.It doesn't take long for Adam, Kai and Mira to realize that they're still in just as much, or more, danger, and the only thing in the world that they know they can count on is each other. Now, they're going to need that bond more than ever.





	1. all my life

**Author's Note:**

> I binged this entire series in one night and I still could not tell you why, but I fell in love with these kids at some point

Leaving the Hollow is disorienting.  
  
'Winning' the Hollow doesn't sound right- they haven't really won anything, as far as they can tell. Answers, maybe, but if so not enough of them.  
  
Adam's sure of a few things when they wake up: that something has spooked Kai. That the other team sure seemed to know it was a game all along. That it's still instinctive to draw closer to Kai and Mira as soon as they're standing.  
  
That he still doesn't remember very much at all.  
  
They don't question it when Weirdie (they really need to learn his name, now) waves them off the stage and down a back corridor, taking the trophy from Kai with a grin. The three of them crowd each other in the hallway, treading on each other's toes, silently desperate not to be separated- and Adam knows that's kind of weird, that they probably aren't (weren't) really this codependent outside of the Hollow.  
  
Weirdie stops and beckons them ahead at the flashing EXIT sign, and it's the rush to get through it together that dooms them.  
  
They enter as a group in a stumbling run. Seconds later, the door slams shut with an ominous mechanical noise, cutting them of from Weirdie, and it's- it's not an exit.  
  
It's an apartment, and the absolute strangeness, the disconnect from expecting to be on their real way out, freezes them all for precious seconds.  
  
The door makes several more ominous noises before Kai manages to turn back to try and open it.  
  
“Locked,” he pants, confirming what they already know.  
  
“Weirdie!” Adam shouts, shouldering hard into the door, forgetting that he's no longer their strongman. “You have to let us out! Tell us what's going on!”  
  
There's no answer.  
  
“Weirdie!” Mira shouts as well. No answer. They still don't even know the man's name.  
  
Or, well, Adam doesn't. It's possible the others have more memories than he does. _That's_ an uncomfortable thought.  
  
“Guys?” Kai's gone the other way, further into the apartment, although he doesn't leave their sight. “Um. I think- I think this is supposed to be our- home.”  
  
At the uncertainty in his voice Adam and Mira abandon the door (still no answer) and go to join him.  
  
It's just an apartment. It's nothing special. Just a one bedroom apartment; the room they're in contains a galley kitchen, a table and three chairs, and a couch. There's... nothing.  
  
Well, not nothing. Nothing that triggers any memories. The refrigerator and pantry are fully stocked. There's two bunkbeds in the bedroom, and a closet full of outfits identical to what they're wearing, and a bathroom with towels and toothbrushes he doesn't remember but that look like what they might each choose. Probably. There's dye that matches Mira's hair.  
  
There are no windows anywhere, and no other doors. There has to be a ventilation system (he hopes) but they find no sign of it.  
  
“Well,” Adam says, surveying the place. “This is worrying.”  
  
“That,” Kai says, backing out of the bedroom to flop onto the couch, “Is an understatement.” He tilts his head back to stare at the ceiling as Mira joins him and Adam begins to pace.  
  
There's... not really anywhere to pace to. The room is not that large.  
  
“I still don't remember anything,” Kai says to the ceiling. “I mean, I remember starting the game and the rules and stuff now, but nothing before that.”  
  
Adam's back at the main door. He's distantly surprised that there even is a handle on this side. He tries it again, just in case, but still nothing. He kicks it, which also does nothing, but he'd thought it would make him feel better. Since he still expects to be stronger than he is, it doesn't. “I don't, either.”  
  
Mira blows her bangs out of her face when they both look at her and slumps further into Kai's side. “Nope. Nothing. I'm not even sure these are our real names.”  
  
“I don't think they are,” Adam says slowly, pacing back towards the bedroom door. He stops at the threshold and goes back the other way again.  
  
He still doesn't want the other two out of his sight. He can't- he can't seem to shake these protective instincts. He doesn't _have_ anything else.  
  
Kai's eyes are closed. Where Adam is all restless energy, Kai just seems exhausted. He slowly pulls the slip with his name on it out of his pocket and hands it to Mira to examine.  
  
It takes everyone a second.  
  
“Wait,” Adam and Mira say at the same time, then look at each other. Adam goes first. “M-maybe that's the only way it could get them into the game?  We're wearing the same clothes...”  
  
“Or they're just not our names,” Kai slurs at the ceiling.  
  
Worried for him now, Adam abandons his pacing to join his friends on the couch. He sits down on Kai's other side and Kai immediately relaxes into him.  
  
“Hey, are you okay?” Adam asks, shaking him a little.  
  
Kai opens his eyes. They're not focused. “Mm. Tired.”  
  
Adam hesitates. He wants to tell Kai to stay awake, but. They're out of the Hollow. There's no reason for that anymore. That he knows of.  
  
...That he knows of.  
  
He meets Mira's eyes.  
  
“Get some sleep, Kai,” she says softly. “We'll keep watch. We need you.”

Kai's eyes slit open further. “You what.”  
  
“We need you to look at the door when you're rested,” Adam says, and then recoils at the glare Mira shoots him. “A-and we need you, as well. Just, like, generally.” After Vanessa and her team, it seems important that they tell Kai that.  
  
Even if it's weird, not knowing if it was true before today. Adam wants to think it was, but after everything that happened in the game it probably doesn't matter now anyway.  
  
Kai mumbles something self-deprecating in response but he's out in moments.  
  
“So,” Mira says, once Kai's breathing is deep and even. She slings one arm along the back of the couch, stretching behind Kai's head to rest a hand on Adam's shoulder. “What do we know?”  
  
“Each other?” Adam offers weakly, and they both laugh quietly.  
  
“They said we were Champions,” Mira says when they've both been quiet again for a little bit. “That implies we've played before.”  
  
“Together, do you think?” Adam asks, but he doesn't really need an answer to that. He leans into her hand and, consequently, into Kai. “How long do you think we've known each other?”  
  
“I don't-” Mira sighs. It's a few minutes before she answers. “Anywhere between a day and a lifetime, Adam. I don't. I don't really know.”  
  
They both fall silent after that. Adam isn't sure what Mira's thinking, but he knows that for him, every minute that passes cements that this is real. They're out of the Hollow, but they're trapped, and while that was technically true already they didn't know it.  
  
“Do you think we're still in the game?” Mira asks abruptly.  
  
Adam's breath catches. “I don't know. I hadn't even thought of that.” It's possible. It's _likely,_ even. He has no idea how they would check.  
  
Suddenly Adam can't be sitting anymore. He shifts Kai carefully into Mira before going back to the door, fruitlessly trying the handle again and then returning to kicking it in frustration.  
  
After the third kick the apartment lights begin to dim and they both freeze.  
  
There weren't any light switches- he doesn't know who's in charge of their lights, but it isn't them. They both wait, tense, for some time after the lights go out completely, but nothing else happens.  
  
The room is pitch black. Adam shakes his head, willing his eyes to adjust, but there's no ambient light anywhere. Like they weren't unsettled enough.  
  
He picks his way carefully back to the couch and nearly sits on Kai. “Okay, now they're just messing with us.”  
  
“I literally can't remember a time when they weren't messing with us,” Mira points out dryly, which isn't really funny, but it makes him laugh anyway.  
  
They take turns sleeping on the couch that night. Well, Adam and Mira do, anyway. Kai seemed so much worse off than them that they let him sleep straight through.  
  
“Do you think it's just harder on some people to play?” Adam asks once when they're switching off.  
  
Mira hesitates. “Maybe? He couldv'e just been up all night before, or something.”  
  
Adam hopes that's all it is. There's nothing he can do about it now so he keeps trying the door whenever he's on watch, but it never moves.  
  
Kai wakes up when the lights fade back on and immediately starts investigating both the door and the surrounding wall.  
  
“Huh,” Mira says from the kitchen- she ate hours ago, so that they could be sure she hadn't had any adverse reactions to the food by the time Kai was hungry.  She'd showered, too, once they realised they could. “Hey, Kai, you realise you're the only one of us whose powers weren't from the game?”  
  
“What are you talking about,” Kai says, distracted, “if I still had firepower I'd be trying to weld this open.”  
  
“You... don't weld things open...” Adam starts, then sighs and goes back to checking the walls for weak spots. Tapping on and hitting them isn't producing any variance in noises but it is definitely irritating him. “She meant that you can fix stuff, Kai. Like with the jet.”  
  
“And the spiders,” Mira called, before frowning down at the food she's grabbed out of the fridge. “Hey, you don't think any of us have food allergies, do you?”

"I hope not- what do you mean, _with the spiders_?" Adam asks, thoroughly distracted.

"Kai fixed the spider," Mira says calmly, picking up the bowl of fruit and climbing over the couch to sit down instead of walking around it like a normal person. Or, well, what Adam assumes is normal from his sample size of... them.

" _Yeah_ I did," Kai says, paying no attention to what he's agreeing with and accepting the apple Adam hands him without looking.

"Seriously, we'd remember any serious allergies, right?" Mira asks. "We remember basic stuff, mostly. Like how to prepare food, and survival stuff, and... I don't know, how to read and write?"

There's a bewildered silence.

Then all three of them scatter to hunt for any books or paper.

"There's nothing here," Mira says, distressed, when they meet back at the couch several minutes later. "How do we even-"

"Our names," Adam says suddenly. "We didn't have any trouble reading our names. And Mira, didn't you find something you could read back in the lab?"

She shakes her head. "I mean, the map, but the map didn't have words.  There were research papers and stuff, but it was all handwritten, nothing was legible... I don't think there was really anything in the way of legible _writing_ in the game besides our names." She hesitates. "Or... maybe that stuff in the lab was supposed to be legible."

Adam winced. He'd thought of that too, but he hoped they were wrong.

"Okay." Kai's hands are gripping his hair. "Okay, okay. I mean, I can still fix stuff, right? So it's not like we forgot _everything_ we knew." He glances between them.  "Right?"

Kai hasn't fixed anything since they got back, but that probably has more to do with opportunity than with Kai, so Adam says, "Right," and sits down. At the table, this time, so that he can see the others. "Yeah, you're right, Kai. We can't freak out about this, we need to keep trying to find a way out."

Kai's face falls as he exhales. "I don't think there _is_ a way out."

Mira blinks at him and says, "There has to be."

"We got in," Adam says firmly. "That means we can get out."

Kai shakes his head. "Yeah, but, I mean, probably not without help. This door is... really complex. It's more than one door, it's part of the wall, and it's really heavy and really, _really_ locked. I don't think we're going to be able to open it."

Groaning, Adam lets his head fall onto the table. "Great. So. We're trapped _and_ hopeless."

"Yeah," Kai admits, joining him at the table. "Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't know what else to try."

"Not your fault," Adam mutters.

Mira doesn't join them at the table, but she does twist to rest her arms on the back of the couch so she can join their conversation. "I actually wish someone had, I dunno, taunted us or something just so we had some information."

"Do you think the game actually glitched?" Kai asks. "Or was that just to get us to hurry?"

"We were already hurrying, though," Mira reminds him. "We thought Adam was dying."

"You what?" Adam says, startled. He knew they'd made Vanessa's team think that, but he hadn't realised that _they'd_ thought it. Although with the number of scares they'd had he shouldn't be surprised.

"Oh hey, there's something we can do," Kai says. "We could bond _without_ thinking anyone's dead." He pauses. "Unless you guys think we're dead."

"We're not dead," Adam and Mira chorus tiredly.

"We _could_ be dead," Kai argues. "Most of our memories are from inside a game. Anything's possible."

"We're not dead," Adam repeats firmly.

Kai picks up a banana and levels it at him. "You have no way to prove that."

"I never had a way to prove that! And you never had a way to prove we were!" Adam groans. "Whatever. No one's dead. What did you actually want to talk about?"

"I dunno, I guess just general getting to know you stuff?" Kai shrugs. "We all know each other but we don't really _know_ each other, you feel me?"

"That's because-" Mira starts, but Adam waves her off.

"Let him try," he says wearily.

"Awesome!" Kai says. "So. What's your favorite color?"

Adam picks his head up to glare at him. "I have no idea."

"Oh. Right." Kai looks dejected. "We don't even know how to know what we don't know."

"I know that sentence should be taken outside and shot," Mira offers flatly, before perking up. "Hey, I know something we know! We know we had a chance to choose powers, right? And there were all kinds of cool powers." She pauses dramatically. "And Adam chose to punch people." 

" _Hey,"_ Adam says. "I think I ended up being pretty damn useful."

"You totally did," Mira agrees. "You still chose punching people for a power."

Kai snickers. "You totally did, man."

"At least we knew what I could do right away." Adam scowls and picks at the hem of his shirt. "I thought you guys were _dead_ when you were figuring out your powers."

The silence creeps back in. Adam tugs at his shirt more. He kind of hates it now- he knows it's the game logo, even if he doesn't know how or why he's wearing it- but all he has to change into is identical shirts. Too bad neither of his friend's clothes will fit him, or he'd wear one of theirs.

He gets up to pace again.

That's how time passes, ultimately. At some point Kai and Mira relocate to the bedroom and he follows them, reluctantly, and paces in there instead. Mira enlists him briefly to push the bunkbeds together in the corner (they don't let Kai help, when he offers, and he's confused but listens to them) and then she and Kai start stripping the bedding from the top bunks to build a fort out of the bottom bunks.

When the lights start to dim again Adam joins them in their blanket fortress.  It's more of a relief than he'd expected.

"I'll take first watch," he tells Kai, who's huddled into the corner with all of their pillows and one of the blankets. "Wake you for second?"

"Yeah," Kai says, and Adam catches his eyes darting back and forth before the room goes entirely dark. "Did this happen last night too?"

"Yeah," Mira says from the foot of the bed. Adam hears her scooting closer to them. "And your eyes never adjust, 'cause there's no light source. It's really annoying."

Kai makes a small noise that he can't readily identify, then, "If we can't see anything, how are we even keeping watch?"

Adam shrugs and the bed moves with him. "We've got ears." He picks at his shirt again.

He feels Mira moving up behind him before she rests a hand on his shoulder. "Adam, if it bothers you that much, just take off the shirt. You already know we don't care."

"I'd rather not," Adam says shortly, and feels hesitation in Mira's frame behind him.

"A-adam?" Kai says, very quietly.

Adam inhales, holds it, and exhales again slowly. "It's... nothing."

"It's not nothing," Mira says. "It wouldn't be upsetting you if it was nothing."

He has to take several deep breaths this time. "We were being watched. All that time." His hands twist further into his shirt and his breath comes faster. "Every mistake we made, every time we thought one of us was dead, people were _watching_ that. Everything we've done has had an _audience_ that we didn't even know about. I can't-" He can't calm down, for one thing.  "I can't get past that."

"Weirdie made it sound like we agreed to it," Kai says hesitantly.

"Yeah." Adam's hands move from his shirt to his hair. "Yeah, he did make it sound like that. But did we? Do _you_ remember agreeing to it?  Because _I don't_ , and okay, maybe... maybe we were different before, we don't know. But I know that I, right now, the person I am now, would not make that agreement. Would you?"

Silence.

"I would," Kai says at last, voice cutting sharply through the dark. "It would depend on what I was offered, but yeah, for some reasons? I think I would. Mira?"

"There are things I'd make that deal for, yes." She presses harder on Adam's shoulder. "But we're different from each other. We aren't thrilled either, but it clearly upsets you more than us."

No kidding. Mira's actually taken a shower since they've been here. Adam can't even take off a shirt he hates more with every passing hour. He has no idea where Kai falls on that scale, but Kai...

Adam doesn't like that his mistakes and insecurities were on display to who knew how many people. Kai had been tricked into trusting someone and then betrayed, and now he knew it had been broadcast. Yeah, Kai had long since said he'd made mistakes, but he'd admitted it _to them_ , not to some mysterious studio audience. Adam hates this, but Kai has arguably had the worst time of it. And Kai just said he'd agree to it in certain circumstances.

He can't justify asking Kai what those circumstances would be, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want to.

"Let's just get some sleep," Adam says at last, defeated. "I'll... figure something out later."

The lights come back on before they make it to third watch this time. That doesn't necessarily tell them much, since no one has any kind of timepiece, but Adam and Mira agree they're pretty sure the lights didn't stay off as long as they had before. 

"Great," Kai mutters, flopping onto his back on the bed. "Now they're trying to disorient us even more. What do you even want?" he asks the ceiling. 

"And why?" Adam says, getting up and kicking the bunk beds in frustration. It doesn't help but it makes him feel a bit better. Well. For a second, it does anyway. 

That's how the next few- days? Probably, but who knows- pass. They keep watch and sleep when the lights are out, they eat and talk and pace when they're on. Adam checks the door so many more times it's essentially a nervous tic at this point. He can't help it. Kai starts doing it, too, and Mira takes over checking the walls. 

The bathroom door doesn't have a lock, which doesn't help Adam's growing paranoia. 

Eventually he gives in and changes into one of Mira's shirts in the dubious safety of the blanket fort. It doesn't fit, at all, but he tried one of Kai's first and that had been even worse, so. He'd live with the uncomfortable fit. 

The only silverware they have is plastic sporks, so. That's fun. All the dishes are lightweight wood that doesn't break even when they take turns throwing plates and bowls into a wall. (Okay, that might also just be for something to do.  And for dealing with some pent up emotions. Look, they can have more than one reason to throw dishes, all right).  Adam tries to break a chair leg off to use as a weapon the second day and, to his disappointment, can't manage it. They could always throw the whole chair at someone, he supposes. 

The Ishibo might have ultimately just been a pretty cool stick, but it was a stick that had _really_ packed a wallop, and Adam definitely misses having it on hand. Between that and the loss of his super strength, he feels disarmed and off balance nearly all the time. It's not so bad for Mira- her powers wouldn't help them here anyway- but he catches Kai trying to start fires more than once. 

Kai's still tired much more often than they are, but he doesn't seem to have noticed the discrepancy and they're careful not to point it out to him. He eats less, too. That might be a good thing right now- they don't seem to have made a dent in their food supply, but it can't be infinite- but it's what it could signify overall that's worrying. 

(Because obviously, they don't have anything like prize money now, but- why might they have signed up for a tournament in the first place?)

They can't tell for sure, but they think the dark-and-light periods vary every time. After realising what had felt like days in the Hollow actually translated to about five hours they already didn't trust their sense of time passing and now it gets worse by the day. That has to be intentional. 

Conversations are... weird. They just don't have much to talk about. Nearly everything they remember is out of their shared experiences, and discussing their preferences is usually quickly strained and depressing. A few times Kai thinks he's remembered something, like that his favorite color is blue, only for the resulting conversation to reveal it's something they learned in the Hollow. 

Also, Kai's favorite color changes every other time they ask him, which is amusing if it's just a Kai trait but worrying if it's a result of memory loss.  Neither Mira nor Adam can settle on a favorite anything so they can't really tell.

"The manual in the ship," Mira says suddenly in the dark one... night, he supposes. "Kai read the manual in the ship!" 

"Well, that's one out of three," Adam mutters.  He's still sitting on the edge of the bed. It's Mira's watch by now, but Adam hasn't been able to sleep. "I left then, remember? He's the only one of us who even tried to read it." 

"But he _did_ read it," Mira insists. "And like you said, we didn't try. Maybe we could have." 

Adam sighs and tilts backwards onto the bed, looking up at Kai (who is still dead to the world) and Mira when he comes to rest on his back.  "We'll find a way to check. You know, eventually."

Mira doesn't grace him with a reply, moving to take his place on watch instead.


	2. you stood by me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am stuck at home with an injury, can't walk and am ready to start climbing walls out of sheer frustration so uh... prepare for a lot of this fic. it's kind of out of control.

"Do you think the glitching gave us, I don't know, brain damage or something?" Kai asks some indefinable amount of time later, sprawled on the bottom bunk. The lights have long since come back on. "Maybe we're supposed to know what's going on. Maybe they didn't realize our memories didn't come back." 

Pacing again, Adam sighs and repeats the sentence he thinks he's said more than anything else now. "We have no way of knowing that."  He's not even sure they'd recognize signs of brain damage.

Maybe they would; he and Mira have recognized signs that something might be wrong with Kai, but he can definitely not tell Kai that.

It's anywhere between four days and a full week before something changes, and then they're... Well, he'd say they might wish it hadn't, except that by then they'd have welcomed really just about any change at all.

Instead of the lights coming back on, the wall in the main room starts showing footage (is that even the right word?) of them playing The Hollow.

Only the last game, so if they've played more they still don't know. Only their team, so their questions about the other kids go unanswered. Only the footage, so that more questions are raised than answered.

And they can't break the screen, although they spend more than half the first run through of their footage trying. It still feels like solid wall.

At least they have more to talk about now.  Although any time they weren't together someone was typically presumed dead, so that sours it a little bit.

He's honestly surprised to see just how freaked out and upset they all look every time.  Seeing Kai trying his hardest to _dig_ after them in the graveyard, with his bare hands at that, is enough to sweep away any lingering resentment he might have had over the Vanessa thing. 

And of course it's not long after that that Kai genuinely thinks he's gotten Adam killed. Adam winces; maybe they weren't in physical danger, but the source of their trauma (and they are definitely traumatized, he thinks grimly, thinking of how difficult it is to be apart even now) is abundantly clear.

Of course, there are other things they never talked about.

"Dude. You kissed Adam?"

"And we agreed never to bring it up again, so shut it, Kai." Mira crosses her arms and pointedly doesn't look at anyone. They're all on the couch, with Kai in the middle again, so that's not hard for her to do.

Kai looks skeptically at Adam, who can only shrug uncomfortably. Honestly, he doesn't have a concrete reason for turning Mira down. It just hadn't felt... right, somehow.

To his credit, Kai lets it drop and doesn't bring it up again.

"Huh," Adam says when it's reached the point where they're actually fighting the other kids. "Did you guys see that?"

Mira blinks. "The tree falling? Kai saved me from it."

"Yeah, but-" Adam gestures at the screen. "That's just it, watch the other team. That same tree nearly hit Vanessa, right? And when she says watch it, Reeve just yells at her."

There's not too much left after that point, but they can all see it now. This is long past the point where the three of them had gotten used to working in tandem and it shows; the other team, despite having been together more often and having stronger powers, is an absolute mess. They have no intention of working in concert. They don't even seem to know it's a possibility. While that's ultimately what let Adam's team win instead, it's still kind of... sad, almost. As terrible as things have been at least the three of them have come out of this experience with each other.

Not for the first time Adam wonders if the other kids are somewhere nearby in an identical apartment.  He's never able to work out how he feels about that idea.

"I wonder if they felt like they had to stick together right from the start," Mira says quietly, breaking into Adam's train of thought.

Adam shakes his head. "Didn't seem like it. Or at least, not the way we did- they knew it was a game pretty early or I don't think they'd have stayed together at all." Their team hadn't even discussed it. They'd just... not known, they hadn't _known_ , they just hadn't _wanted_ to be separated.

"It does seem more likely that we already knew each other," Kai says. "Like, we were friends before, so we subconsciously knew to stay together. Like how I knew to fix stuff, or that there was a third witch."

"Not that it matters now," Mira points out.  "We're all best friends now anyway." She pauses, then adds slyly, "Who apparently all wanted to make out with each other at some point."

"I thought we agreed we weren't bringing that up," Adam says, feeling himself flush hot.

"Hey, that was a specific incident. I didn't say anything about discussing what you two talked about while I was underwater." She's grinning now. "Or about-"  
  
"Yeah okay that's enough," Adam says quickly. "How about, just, a blanket ban on that entire topic. Because this?" He nods at the screen. "This is not helping with my whole... voyeurism panic situation." It's really not, because there are a lot of conversations and interactions on this screen that he wouldn't have _had_ unless he'd thought they were in private.

The way Adam sees it, even if past-Adam had been okay with that sort of information being broadcast (and he had serious doubts on that topic), current Adam was adamantly against it.  How is informed consent about amnesia supposed to even work, anyway? He shifts uncomfortably.

When the three on the screen hit the game-ending button, the footage loops back to the beginning and everyone groans. Kai gets up to find something to eat while they watch again, because really, what else is there to do.

They're starting to get a little bit of a grasp on parts of their personalities that survived the memory wipe, at least. Mira points out that Adam is distrusting of everyone except the two of them right from the start.

"And look," she says, gesturing wildly. "Watch, watch the way we're acting- we've known each other for like ten minutes, but we're both really sure about how Kai's gonna react to stuff, right? So that's another point towards us knowing each other."

"That still doesn't really matter anymore," Adam points out. "We're friends _now_."

Kai shrugs and crosses his arms. He likes watching the beginning of their memories even less than the other two. "Doesn't mean we don't still want some more answers."

"What if we're totally different with our memories, though?" Mira asks, watching as on the screen Kai tries to scale an electrified fence and Adam tries to break it open with a rock. Okay, so critical thinking had not necessarily been their strong suit early on.

In their defense he's now positive that switch wasn't there originally.

Kai is pretending to be busy in the kitchen and doing a poor job of it. Adam watches his hands shake as he says, "What, you mean like, maybe our personalities are different?" He scowls. "Are we having a philosophy debate now?"

Turning around entirely, electing to watch Kai instead of the screen, Mira says, "Should we? What if our memories come back and we all actually hate each other?"

In the video, Kai is doing his best to irritate Adam, who reacts by freeing him in the minotaur's lair. Adam waves back at it. "I really don't think we would, dude. Mira's right, we _do_ act like we know each other."

"At this point, we do," Kai shoots back, knuckles white on his sleeves.

Mira points at the screen. "No, remember how Adam was back at the shack? He distrusted every sign of other people immediately. But not us. Not even when we first woke up trapped in a room." She shrugs. "If something _that_ dramatic didn't make us hate each other, I don't think we can, Kai."

Eventually Kai settles enough to sit on the couch with them again. They shift to let him sit in the middle, which is habit by now, but which turns out to be a very good precaution when they continue to watch. Kai flinches every time he makes a stupid remark or bad decision on screen, which, at the beginning, is pretty frequently. He doesn't seem to notice that Adam and Mira do it too.

Adam threw a wrench at an electric fence. He's not going to disparage anyone else's life choices at this point.

"That really was a solid plan," Adam says as they watch the Akki Monks bring them outside. "We would have won right there if the other kids hadn't shown up."

Because they're all crammed onto the couch, they both feel Kai's full body flinch at that.

Mira twists around to look at him. "Hey, Kai, they tricked you. Stop worrying about it."

"They didn't trick either of you, though," Kai mutters.

"We've already determined that I am apparently inherently just super paranoid," Adam points out.

"And I didn't want to kiss any of them," Mira adds. To her credit, she does not actually emphasize the word them, but both boys wince anyway.

Kai doesn't acknowledge either response other than that, focusing on the screen again.

It's weird to watch their choices play out this way. It makes the glaring contrast between the way they interact and the way the other kids interact stand out even more, now that they're looking for it.

When they've cycled back to the graveyard, Adam gets up to pace again.

The footage plays through three more times, then the screen goes dark with the lights and they all retreat to the lower bunk.

"Well," Adam says, letting the blanket fall shut behind them. They still haven't gotten themselves out of the habit of setting watches, so he settles nearest it. "We got a change, at least."

Mira huffs. "What we _want_ is an explanation."

"Maybe it is one?" Kai offers. "And we just have to, I dunno, interpret it?"

"I want to say that's unlikely, but I have no idea." Mira sighs and Adam feels the bed shift as she settles against the wall with Kai.  "For all we know this is normal. Doesn't feel normal, but what does."

Adam looks around futilely. There's no more ambient light in here than ever. "I think we'd know if this was considered normal. It definitely doesn't feel like it." They still haven't been able to accurately pin down what they do and don't know for sure. There are some things they can all agree on, like that there should be twenty four hours in a day; there are some things only two out of the three of them agree on, like whether or not Skeet had been conventionally attractive (they may have put limits on certain discussions but they were still bored teenagers); and there were things only one of them believed, the same way Adam had been inherently distrustful of anyone outside their group from the moment they'd met.  They can't know how much is influenced by what they've forgotten and how much is just part of who they _are_ ; they still can't _know_ anything and Adam is not sure how much longer he can take that.

And if he's reaching his breaking point, Kai's gone sailing past his several days ago.

The kid's a wreck, visibly, in more ways than one. He still doesn't eat enough, still sleeps too much, and by now Adam and Mira are sure that their suspicions from the first night back were correct. Something is wrong with Kai. It's hard to say what, exactly, but he's... ill, or something. They just don't know how, or what with, or what to do about it, or anything that might be useful.  By now Kai has to know something's going on but he doesn't broach the topic either so they're at a stalemate- no one wants to be first to address it. 

The footage doesn't turn on and loop every time the lights are on after that, but it does start to do so pretty frequently. Adam tunes it out and returns to checking the door and pacing. Mira takes to throwing dishes at the wall in a desultory sort of way. (If she throws them more often whenever Vanessa is on screen, the boys know better than to comment). Kai and Mira watch more than Adam does, although in Kai's case he thinks that's partially because the other boy is always tired and it gives him a reason to sit down and not move much. He still doesn't seem to know that Adam and Mira aren't about to make him do anything he doesn't want to.

There's something Adam can be proud of: no matter how much they fought early on, it looks like neither of them ever targeted Kai's insecurities the way Vanessa had. In fact, they'd all been supportive of each other in a way he really can't imagine the other kids were.

The more they watch the game, the more they're sure the other team had _known_ it was a game the whole time. Why they know,  and why their own team hadn't, is still a mystery.

Honestly, it's kind of a relief when they wake up in a forest.


	3. when no one else

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know what I did not manage to write into this story? logical chapter cut off places

"Well," Adam says to the sky,  as soon as he's aware of Mira and Kai on either side of him. "At least there's no walls."

There's no immediate danger, so he doesn't wake his friends. Kai was supposed to be on watch and should really be awake, but honestly, if they're waking up in strange forests that's the least of his concerns. Besides, there are several good explanations for that.

And it was probably kind of weird for them to still be setting a watch, anyway. Not that any of them plan to stop doing it.

Whatever forest they're in, they're deep inside of it. It doesn't feel like the forest from the Hollow- this one is mostly pine trees, and there's a bite in the air that tastes of snow and makes Adam shiver and wish vaguely that the shirt he borrowed from Mira was sturdier. He still prefers it to his own shirts right now but he's already worriedly thinking of ways to keep them all warm.

Staying carefully in line of sight, Adam completes a circle around where they woke and returns to his friends, crouching on his heels to gently shake Mira awake first. "Hey, Mira. Don't panic."

"Oh, _that's_ reassuring," Mira mutters as she sits up with a yawn. Blinking the last remnants of sleep out of her eyes, she rakes her gaze over their new situation. "Oh. Okay. We'll let Kai do all the panicking, then." She reaches out and puts one hand on Kai's shoulder, but falls still rather than continuing to shake him awake. "So is the plan to treat everything like it's real again?"

"We make plans when Kai is awake," Adam says firmly, crouching down on Kai's other side to push at his free shoulder. "Kai?"

Kai is a heavier sleeper than the two of them, which they know both from waking each other to keep watch and from the fact that Kai has more nightmares than either of them. It takes him longer to wake up, and when he does, his eyes dart around for a good while before taking in details.

"Where are we?" he asks, voice small.

"Dunno," Adam admits. "Probably back in the game, but we're not sure. Think we should just go ahead and treat it as real?"

Kai accepts Adam's hand up and they all get to their feet, glancing around. They're not even in a real clearing, just a space between trees barely big enough to fit them all at the same time. Adam looks, but these are pine trees, not the solid and sturdy trees of the Ironwood's forest; none of these branches will make much of a weapon.

Not that he stops looking.

Kai's hands are twitching in a familiar way. No fire powers, then. Adam hasn't checked yet, but he doubts his strength is back, either.

"Yeah," Kai says at last, turning around in a wary circle. "Sounds like a plan."

"Good." Mira exhales. "Let's get out of here. No matter what's going on, I don't want to stay where someone else left us."

They let Mira pick a direction at random and set off through the woods. At first Mira and Adam set a pace around a light jog, but Kai starts lagging almost immediately, so they slow down again.

Adam picks up some pine cones, but without any convenient way to carry them he can't pick up very many.  When he sees what he's doing Kai picks up a few too. He juggles them as he walks and drops them pretty frequently.

That's something he guesses they can add to their 'what we know' list- Kai actually can juggle.

They don't walk too long, since mostly they just want to get away from their starting point. They change course more than once, and when they hit a river they all wade through it for a while.

("Why wilderness survival?" Adam mutters, frustrated.

Kai shakes his head. "Dunno, dude. It isn't something I remember. Looks like that one's more on you.")

They pass up the first clearing they see- and the next one, and the next. No one wants to stop anywhere obvious.

Finally they find a place to stop. It isn't an actual clearing either, just a huge tree whose boughs hide a sheltered hiding place.

"It's going to be dark soon," Mira notes. "If we start a fire, it'll be visible for miles."

"We don't actually have a way to start a fire, so that won't really be an issue," Adam points out dryly as he scans the tree's interior. Kai is already settling against the trunk and breathing hard. "But, we should pay attention to the weather. It's cold enough to be verging on dangerous, and if it starts snowing there'll be even more to watch out for." He frowns at Kai. "Like tree wells."

Kai frowns back at him, wrapping his arms around his knees and shivering. With a sigh, Adam abandons his post and goes to join him.

"They happen when it snows," Adam says slowly, finding he has to really concentrate to grasp what it is he knows about this. "There's... looser snow at the base of trees, that acts like quicksand." He's pretty sure he knows more than that but it's like reaching after something in a dream. No matter how he tries, he can't quite grasp. He sighs again. "Mira, come over here."

Mira joins them and they huddle close. Without gear or a fire, this is the warmest they're likely to get, and anyway they're pretty used to curling up together by now. It's not night, but if anyone is tracking them (and not just _watching,_ Adam thinks bitterly) then getting off a schedule is something they want to do sooner rather than later.

"Usual watches?" Mira asks softly.

Adam nods. Kai doesn't; he's already snoring against Adam's shoulder.

Mira looks at him sadly. "Whatever it is, it's still going on.  I didn't notice it in the game- I was hoping if we were back in..." She trails off.

He gets it. As awful as the idea of being back in a game, running for their lives for the amusement of strangers is, he'd at least hoped it would cure whatever was wrong with Kai. "Me too, but it didn't. How do we ask him about it?"

She stares at him. "We're going to ask about it?"

"Yeah?" Adam frowns. "I wasn't planning on going behind his back, here. We trust each other, remember?" That's practically the only thing Adam is sure of anymore. 

"That isn't what I meant," Mira says hastily. Like their first night on the couch, she wraps an arm across Kai's shoulders to rest one hand on Adam. "I'm just worried it's going to be a sensitive topic. You know what Kai's like, he won't want us to worry about him."

"Yeah, well, maybe he needs to know we do worry about him." Adam scowls at the dirt. "What if it's something serious, Mira? What are we going to do about it? And what if Kai does know something about it and just hasn't wanted to speak up?"

"He's got to know _something_ is going on," Mira says softly. "We're not exactly subtle."

"That just makes it more important. He needs to know we're worried for him. I don't want him to get the idea he's not contributing enough, or something."

Mira winces. "Ouch. Yeah, you're right, I hadn't thought of that. So." She hesitates. "How... _do_ we ask?"

"I asked you first," Adam mutters.

"Guys," Kai slurs. "M'not asleep. Y'can stop arguing."

"Okay, you're not entirely awake there, either, Kai," Adam says, because Kai is still curled heavily into his side, fingers plucking fretfully at Adam's shirt. None of them are exactly touch shy at this point, but this is still considerably more than Kai allows when he's alert. "What have you got to tell us?"

Kai sighs and Mira moves in closer to both of them. "N'thing. I don't know anything, either. Just. Tired, all the time." His words drag out of him. "Nauseous a lot. Didn't feel like this, when we were still playing. Was about the only good thing about it."

He sounds more alert by the second, so Adam says, "Kai, this is important. I know it's hard, but if you concentrate, can you tell if you remember feeling like that _before_ we played the Hollow?"

Kai's eyes drift open slightly as he tries to remember. "I... think so? It feels familiar."

Adam glances up and meets Mira's eyes. He's not sure if that's the answer they want or not. He's not sure what to do with it if it is. He's not sure of anything, anymore, except his friends.

He'd be happy to _miss_ being sure of something because it would mean that at some point, he had been.

"I don't think there's anything we can do," Adam says at last, defeated. "Kai, you have to tell us whenever you're not feeling well, all right? We'll help you."

Kai scowls, eyes falling shut again. "Mm. Don't wanna slow anyone down. Could get us in danger."

"If we get into trouble, we get into it together," Mira says firmly. "We _are_ a team."

They all fall silent then, and Adam's not the only one who huddles in closer in the wake of that declaration. That the three of them are a team has become one of their foundations. It's something they _know,_ the way they know very few things anymore. Probably anymore. It's possible their memory loss predates playing the Hollow, after all, although that seems unlikely.

In the end they only stay where they are until shortly after dark, when the moon rises and provides enough light to see by. Mira and Adam are too restless to stay any longer and even Kai is uncomfortable.

"Let's get further away from where we started," he says, struggling to his feet with the help of the trunk and ignoring Adam's outstretched hand. "And maybe try to find a way to get warm."

They follow the river for as long as it seems safe to do so. Kai seems to be doing better after a rest, or at least, he's acting like he is. They make it quite a distance away before needing to stop, at any rate.

Maybe it helps that they don't talk. Kai juggles pine cones as they walk again, and Adam shoves a few more into his pockets, and Mira helps them over wet patches of rock- she debates swimming for a bit, but discards the idea due to the temperature- but they don't talk much. No one knows what to say anymore. At least before they'd had a goal, inasmuch as 'find a way out of this apartment' is a goal.

This time they find a cave to rest in, just far enough off the river to alleviate any fears of flooding. Like before, Kai heads immediately for the back of the cave for a wall to put himself up against. Watching him it occurs to Adam that Kai really doesn't like to leave his back open. Even in the apartment Kai had gravitated to the shelter of the corner on the bunkbed.

That's not about Kai, really, is it? Adam recalls the footage they've watched- the way the Ishibo had hit _him_ in the back, thrown by someone Kai had- maybe not trusted, even Kai hadn't trusted Reeve, but he'd been with Vanessa's team long enough to feel betrayed by then.

Kai's lost that trusting nature. That might be better for the group overall, but Adam's not sure it's good for Kai.

Without a set goal- they had gotten home, and it wasn't at all what they wanted- Adam notices they gravitate towards each other even more. If he'd thought a little absently that were kind of codependent when they first left the Hollow, well, he's fast realising that had been nothing. Now they're so much worse. Now even Mira gets twitchy if anyone leaves line of sight and she's been handling their situation better than either of the boys.

That's probably because Mira had found her powers relatively early and had saved herself nearly every time, but it still makes Adam feel inadequate. He still doesn't want to lead but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel the weight of responsibility. Kai and Mira are all he has, and if he can't keep them safe, what good is he? 

When he voices that concern Mira stares at him incredulously. 

Adam shifts, feeling his borrowed shirt snag uncomfortably. "What?" 

Mira shakes her head slowly, still staring, before seeming to find her voice. "And here I've been worrying about Kai. Adam, we like you _for you,_ you idiot, not for what you can _do_ for us.  We're not like those other kids." 

"No, you're not, are you?" a new voice says hoarsely from outside the cave. Kai's eyes snap open and he scrambles to his feet as Mira and Adam whirl to face the newcomer. 

It's _Skeet_ , of all people, and his voice sounds wrecked when he repeats, "You're not like us at all." 

Adam takes out a pine cone and is readying to throw it when Skeet says, "Wait, I'm alone. I'm just a messenger." 

Adam hesitates and Kai says, "You have a message?" at the same time as Mira says, "Why should we trust you?" 

Skeet shakes his head. "I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm just giving you the message and leaving."

Lowering his arm but not his guard, Adam says, "What's the message, then?" 

"I'm supposed to tell you it's all about team cohesion, and give you this." He hands a journal to Mira, who's moved so that she's closest. "And to tell you to make it home again. That's all I know." 

And then he starts to fade. 

"Whoa!" Kai hobbles forwards, reaching for Skeet, and closes his hands on empty air as the other boy vanishes entirely. He stares down at his empty hands, looking lost. 

It's telling that while he limped forwards the other two made no move to reach for the fading boy, but no one comments. Adam's not even sure Skeet was real. Whoever sent him might have just assumed the team would be more likely to listen to someone they recognized, and that's frankly a very short list. 

"That's a point for back in the game, at least," Mira says. 

"Back in or still in," Adam agrees.

Kai scowls as Adam steadies him and they duck out of the cave. Now that Skeet's been and gone, they don't even have to talk about it; they know none of them want to stay here. "Still? You guys think the apartment was part of it, too?"

Mira shrugs. "We don't know, but it would make sense. Why pull us out if they don't have to?" 

"That's... true," Kai said slowly, deflating a bit. "I just don't want it to be." 

"Make it home _again_ ," Adam mutters, trailing behind the other two so that he can keep an eye on their backtrail. "That implies the apartment was real, though, doesn't it?" 

"It implies the apartment was home," Mira reminds him. "Which it wasn't." It's her turn to scowl. "At least not that I'm acknowledging." 

"Home is you two," Kai says suddenly, and everyone goes quiet for a long time after that.

Hiking through the woods is more tiring than they remember but they want to get far away from the cave where Skeet found them. They wade through the river again, then strike out away from it until they hit a smaller stream to follow instead. 

While they walk Mira scans the journal. Inside the front cover are  pictures of the three of them, and what might be some kind of information _about_ them under the photos- but none of them can read it, not even Kai. The journal's got handwritten information on every page, in fact, but it's just as incomprehensible. 

"So," Mira says tiredly. "Who's in favour of language we don't know, and who's in favour of we forgot how to freaking read?"

Kai  groans. "I hope it's a language we don't know. I don't want to be illiterate." 

" _If_ that's what's going on, we'll just have to learn how," Adam says firmly. "None of us are stupid. We'll learn.  Anyway, Kai, you're the only one of us we know _can_ read.  That puts it in favor of a language we don't know." 

Mira mutters something that sounds an awful lot like "Learn from who?" that Adam chooses to ignore. 

Honestly, Mira has to be the most frustrated of them all- she'd liked having a built-in universal translator. That it didn't seem to apply to the written word was a blow.  

They don't even try for a sheltered campsite this time, they just settle for the second clearing they come to. Kai finds a tree to put his back up against. Adam paces. Mira looks through the journal again. 

The apartment bathroom hadn't had a mirror, so the pictures in the journal are the first time they've seen themselves. Adam frowns at his. "I've got a scar on my face? Is that from one of the fights we were in?" 

Kai shakes his head. "No dude, you've had that since we woke up the first time. Guess we assumed you knew." 

That bothers Adam, the idea that there's something so basic about his own appearance that he never knew. "Great. What other basic information about myself do I not know?" He kicks at the pine needles littering the ground. 

"Your age, your last name, your favorite colour," Mira says without looking up. 

"Whether you play sports. Whether you have siblings. If your parents are divorced.  If you have parents," Kai contributes. 

"Thanks guys. You're so helpful," Adam says dryly as he gives up and takes a seat beside Kai. Minutes later, he has to get up and pace again. 

Kai coughs and adds tiredly, "If you've got any health problems." 

Adam and Mira both wince. 

"I don't think we have parents." Mira takes Adam's spot next to Kai. "Or at least not living parents. Someone would have come looking for us, right?"

"Maybe we just don't have particularly good parents," Adam says. 

That earns him dirty looks from both his friends. 

Adam holds both hands up defensively. "I'm just saying. What if they, I don't know, signed us over to the company that made the game? That would explain why they're _still_ messing with us. What if they, like, _own_ us?" 

"That still doesn't mean we have terrible parents," Mira argues. "Our parents could just not know. Or we could be lab experiments or something." 

Kai raises his hand. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I am beginning to prefer the 'we're dead' theory. It's less depressing." 

"I just..." Adam sags a little. He wants to go sit down with his friends, but he knows he'll be up and pacing again in moments.  "It doesn't seem like there's anyone to care what happens to us. And... I mean, you guys saw the video, too. I _woke up_ defensive. I had to learn that somewhere, right?" 

"I woke up trusting," Kai reminds him. "So did Mira, a little. I think that's just who we _are_ , dude." He shrugs. "Maybe not everything needs a reason." 

"Well good, because we're a little low on those," Adam says shortly and finally sits down. There's not much point, because he always takes first watch, but he needs the reassurance of his friends for as long as he can sit still. 

They have the bare bones of a plan now. They have the journal- they have to find someone who can teach them to read it. 

"Why not someone to read it for us?" Kai asks. "Wouldn't that be faster?"

"Probably," Adam says. "But I want to know what it says for myself, for certain. I don't trust someone else to tell us everything."

Since they have, as far as they know, never known anyone but each other that they can trust, that seems like a valid concern to him. Kai grumbles, but concedes.

The next two days are nothing but hiking through the seemingly endless woods. The stream provides plenty of (running) water (Adam vaguely remembers it being important that it's _running_ water, but he can't articulate why), but they're all feeling the lack of food acutely. They'd really taken the free access to food in the apartment for granted. 

They talk maybe-Skeet's comments to death. 

"Team cohesion," Mira says. "It's all about team cohesion. So, what, they're trying to make us codependent?" She considers that. "Because I mean. I think they're done, if that's the goal." 

They all take turns at trying to catch fish, with varying degrees of success. Mira comes closest to catching anything, actually getting her hands on a fish once, but even if she'd held on they still don't have a way to start a fire. They take a day for Kai and Adam to set up snares (something Kai halfway recalls as well, to everyone's bewilderment, including Kai) with even less success. 

"Well," Adam says, surveying their unsprung traps gloomily. "Whoever we are, we're not outdoorsmen." 

"Maybe you were a scout?" Kai suggests, straightening from a crouch. The trap he was checking had been sprung, but it's empty save for a tuft of fur. 

"I don't remember what a scout is, Kai," Adam says tiredly.  "Unless you mean scout as in scouting the area?" 

"Really?" Kai frowns down at the trap. "No, I meant something specific. It's a- scouting was some kind of... club, I think. They did... outdoorsy stuff."

Adam stares at the trap without really seeing it. "Then no, I don't think I was." He hasn't been trying very hard to figure out where he knows survival tricks from, especially compared to Kai and Mira. He knows he should be, knows it's the most memory of anything that any of them have shown so far, but he doesn't think he wants to know why _that_ , of all things, seems intrinsic to him. 

He values _knowing_ things.  They all do, precisely because there are so few things they _do_ know. So this fear... He doesn't know why he doesn't want to know this, but it can't be anything good. 

He sighs. "Let's just get back to Mira." 

Mira, thankfully, has made more progress than them. She's not only got a lean-to set up (courtesy of Adam's reluctant instructions before they'd split up), she's actually managed to get a fire going. 

"Hey," she greets them wearily. "I remembered a trick with some sticks..." She gestures at the fire. "I'll teach you guys."  They're finding sticks now, at least- twigs more than anything, and nothing that will make a suitable weapon (Adam has checked), but enough to have a fire. 

"Maybe _she_ was a scout," Adam suggests to Kai. 

Mira raises an eyebrow. "What the hell is a scout?" 

So they have fire, after that. They're not worried anymore about it letting people know where they are- Skeet's appearance and disappearance shows that, whoever left them here, they can find them if they want to. 

The next day Kai actually catches a fish. It's only one fish, split between three people, but it's also the first thing they've eaten in days and therefore delicious by default. 

They stay at that campsite for a few days, managing to catch a few more fish and even a couple rabbits before feeling like they're rested (and fed) enough to move on. Plus now, they have more of a handle on hunting, fishing and building fires- Mira makes good on her promise to teach the boys how she started the fire. Kai is best at it, unsurprisingly, but it still takes all of them a while. 

They still can't seem to find the edge of the woods and it's getting colder.

"Maybe it's just woods this time," Mira says after a long time of walking in silence. Kai is shivering between the other two, who are staying as close as they reasonably can without tripping each other or rendering themselves unable to walk between trees. "Maybe there's nothing else here." 

"What would be the point of that?" Adam says. "Whoever's watching this has to be bored as hell."

"There might not be anyone watching us," Kai says, but his words fall flat. He knows that's something that upsets Adam too much to be easily dismissed. Adam frets about it too much for anyone _not_ to know. He still won't change out of Mira's borrowed shirt, even though it's clearly uncomfortable for him to wear. 

Mira sighs and signals for a rest, pulling out the journal again as she finds a log to sit on. It's still indecipherable, but that doesn't stop them from taking turns trying to read it. 

While she idly flips pages, Kai draws in the dirt with the toes of his sneakers. They still can't form recognizable letters other than their names, but Kai has taken to copying the characters in the journal, even without knowing what they mean. 

Adam tries to convince himself it could still be a foreign language, but the fact that none of them have managed to write legibly yet is tipping heavily in favor of the 'illiterate' idea. It's more frustrating than he'd ever imagined. 

It takes him days to work out that it's because it makes him feel like an idiot. 

Which is stupid- they're all in the same boat here, and he definitely doesn't think Kai or Mira are dumb. He doubts this is even their fault. 

Finally, finally, they come across a log cabin. Adam pulls the other two behind a tree to survey it from a distance. 

"Adam," Mira says, putting her hands on both his shoulders. "I know how you feel, but we have to talk to someone. We need help." 

"But what if-" Adam starts. 

"Adam," Kai says, "Please, man."

Adam looks at the dark circles under his friend's eyes and reluctantly relents. 

No one is in the cabin when they enter, but there are clear signs of someone living there, so they wait. It takes a massive amount of willpower to ignore the ready food available but they all manage to wait. 

The woman who eventually comes back pauses in the doorway at the sight of them, then seems to dredge up a smile. A smile, Adam notes, with edges, however faint. "Ah. Hello. How can I help you?"

"We're lost," Kai says immediately, before anyone else can get a word in.  "We've been lost in these woods for days." 

Mira holds up the notebook. "And we need help reading this. It's all..." She hesitates. They haven't come up with a story for this. They hadn't even thought of it. "It's all our parents left us," she finishes lamely, ignoring the incredulous stares that earns her from both boys. 

The woman's face softens at that. "Oh, you poor children. How long have you been out here?" 

They share an uncertain look before Mira offers tentatively, "Days?" 

She tuts. "Oh, you poor dears!"

Adam feels a little bit ill at that.  By the other's expressions, he's not the only one. 

The woman's name is Kova, and she insists on feeding them before anything else. She recruits Adam to help her hunt in the evenings, and Mira to fish- she takes a long, considering look at Kai and then says she'll teach him to identify and prepare plants for use in medicine. 

She's a witch, they're pretty sure, but not the kind that comes in threes so it's... okay. Probably. Maybe. 

They're not staying any longer than they have to. 

She's only teaching Kai to read the journal, which grates, but it isn't like Kai won't share what he knows with Adam and Mira.  (With his siblings, he snickers, late at night when they curl up together on the floor. Adam still can't believe that worked.  This woman has to be a program). 

They don't stay very long.  They can't; Adam is too restless.

Oh, Kai and Mira say they are too, but they're not and he knows it. He knows this is about him, about the way he gets up to go outside and pace in the middle of the night, the way he always ducks back in before long to rake his gaze over his friends before going back outside to pace some more. 

He can't help it. He hates sitting still. 

He hates sitting. 

He can't stay in one place for long without thinking of waking up in that chair, and he can't stay sitting at all. 

He doesn't know why he's so much worse affected than his friends, but he is. He's still wearing Mira's shirt, and he still hardly sleeps, and he still spends so much time pacing back and forth that he wears trails in the dirt. 

So. They stay long enough that Kai will be able to teach them how to read the journal (how to read), and then they leave, stealing out in the middle of the night because Adam doesn't trust Kova to let them go and Kai and Mira do trust Adam. 

He's not sure they should, but he's too grateful (too selfish) to tell them that.

They hike for two days, only stopping for Kai to rest, before he starts teaching them what he's learned. 

"Can't you just tell us what it says?" Mira asks him, not for the first time. 

Kai, who's been unusually quiet since he started reading, shakes his head grimly. "Yeah, but you need to read it for yourselves."

"You could still tell us," Adam points out. "We could keep learning after you tell us, too."

"I'm afraid you won't want to," Kai admits, adding to the number of things Adam worries about when he paces late at night. 

The journal is not reassuring. 

It's also not as helpful as they'd hoped. 

Adam stares down at the page as they huddle together on a log, the crackle of the fire seeming loud in his ears. "So. We really _are_..." He swallows and forces the words out. "We're their property?" 

"Assuming this isn't just to mess with us," Mira says hastily. "Which, all things considered, we might want to assume." 

Adam barely hears her, still staring at the journal. His breath is coming faster than before.

Dimly, he knows he's taking this very, very badly. 

Why? He suspected this might be true from the start. There's too much wrong with him to be all from the game, and they could all see it had started before they'd even woken up, the evidence had been plain to see in the video they'd been shown. 

It's not about him, he realises slowly. He'd been prepared for it to be about him- he could live with that. He'd just.. hoped, stupidly, he supposes, that there was some other, better reality for Kai and Mira. He'd hoped. They didn't deserve this. 

"Adam," he hears Mira hiss, low, in his ear. "Adam, you don't deserve this, either- Adam, come on." There's a tug on his arm. He lets himself list into it, feeling first one set of arms, then another, wrap around him tightly. 

The journal's in the dirt. He stares at it. The journal with their answers in it, answers they've wanted for weeks; they probably shouldn't leave it sitting in the dirt, certainly not so close to their fire. 

He doesn't move to pick it up. 

It has their answers, all right, and he's never wanted them less.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when I was younger we had to slightly desperately lie to the staff at a theme park that I and three friends were siblings  
> we are blatantly different nationalities and look nothing alike


	4. was ever behind me

 

_Property._ That hurt, more than he'd ever expected. He'd suspected it, he thought he'd been prepared for it, but- 

They don't even have names, not really. Their names were assigned for the game, chosen by contest winners, and somehow, that hurts the most. Not only do they belong to an entertainment company, everyone _knows_ it, and they're deriving entertainment from it. Even their names had been a source of entertainment for strangers. Their names are one of the only things they have and they belong to other people. 

Had they voted on the amnesia mechanic, too? Is this why, while the other team had known they were playing a game, his had been left in the dark instead? 

There's another thing he's avoiding thinking too hard about- the reason the other team _had_ known. 

The programmers hadn't known if the amnesia effect was reversible, so they hadn't used it on the paying players. The three of them, though... the three of them apparently weren't required to give consent at all. 

They _hadn't_ agreed to this. 

Adam's voice is thick with held back emotion as he says, "We're just toys to them, aren't we?" He stares unseeing over his friend's shoulders as they press close. "To everyone. We're just entertainment." He jolts a little, then, at the sudden thought that people were watching this, that this, too, was entertainment, just as their fear and desperation and confused homesickness had been before, there were _people watching this_ -

"Adam!" Mira shakes him. "Adam, calm down!" 

"No one is watching," Kai is repeating, voice pitched low, hand awkwardly rubbing soothing circles into Adam's back. "No one is watching us right now. Adam, it's a rest game, they don't get broadcast, no one is watching us right now." 

"Monitors," Adam chokes out.

Kai hesitates. "Well. Yeah." 

Mira shoots him a dirty look as Adam's breath goes ragged again. 

"It's alright," Mira tries again, voice strained. "Adam, it'll be all right." 

"Not even my name," he mutters. 

"Well it doesn't look like they wanna tell us what they were before, so I guess it is now," Kai says flatly. Somehow it's that, the dark edge to Kai's voice as he says that, that helps Adam calm his breathing at last. He shuts his eyes. 

"We could always choose new ones," Mira suggests. 

Adam feels Kai shake his head. "That wouldn't feel right. Besides, I'm kind of used to these now." He hesitates, before adding quietly, "They're the only names I remember anyway."

Something deep inside Adam aches. 

_We didn't deserve this,_ a voice whispers inside his head. 

_Did we?_

He doesn't _know_ , after all. The journal doesn't tell them how old they are, or what lives they might have led before being- sold to? _given_ to?- before becoming the property of the Hollow. It didn't tell them how that had happened, or why, or when. Just that it had. 

"We're kids, though," Adam croaks out at last, eyes still screwed shut. His forehead is resting on someone's shoulder- Mira's, he thinks. "We're _kids_.  Someone had to be- had to be responsible for us even ending up in that position in the first place." 

"Yeah," Kai agrees reluctantly, shifting slightly, and Adam realises it's Kai's shoulder after all. "Looks like you were right about lousy parents." 

Adam laughs hoarsely. "I don't want to be right." 

He doesn't recover, exactly, but he starts to breathe easier, and when Kai and Mira gently maneuver him off the log to curl up with them in the dirt he lets them. His eyes stay closed and he falls asleep, and he doesn't wake up to pace even once. 

He'd wanted answers, and devastating as they'd been, he has them. He refuses to regret that. They'd needed to know and now they did. 

He just wishes they'd been different. 

In the morning they move again. They're back to being aimless, but they want to get far away from Kova's so that she doesn't come looking for them. Sure, she's probably a program, but if they don't stick to acting as though everything in their environment is real the strain is going to be too much.  It's _already_ too much. 

Adam wonders if there was ever any plan for the possibility of their never recovering from their amnesia. 

"You said this was a rest game," he asks Kai later. 

Kai lags a little.  He's still slower than them; the journal hadn't seen fit to explain whether he was ill or not, so maybe it's a temporary thing after all. "Yeah, it's supposed to be.  The apartment's a rest, too, but if the journal's not lying, it's real." He winces. "It's a cage, but it's a real cage." 

Adam has to stop and breathe again. His friend's hands on each of his elbows ground him. 

"What happens after the rest ends?" he grinds out. 

Kai hesitates.

"Kai," Adam says, and breathes. 

"I don't know." Kai's voice is small. "Adam, I don't know." 

That's familiar, at least. 

They limp along, hurting and confused, stopping to rest whenever Kai begins to flag or Adam starts to have another anxiety attack. Mira's the most collected of them now, quietly harrying them along and encouraging them when they don't want to keep moving. 

It's not fair to Mira. 

It's not fair to any of them. 

Eventually, days away from Kova's house, they find of all things a treehouse. It's deserted, so they take it over. 

Kai crashes. There's no bed, just a pile of dusty blankets on a dirty floor, but they're all exhausted and Kai's the worst off by far so he pulls the blankets into a nest and sleeps for nearly a day. Adam honestly wants to join him, but he can't leave Mira alone to hunt and fetch water. 

He has to actively stop himself from thinking about how they all know they aren't really doing any of this. He'll lose it if he lets himself think about it. 

He thinks maybe he's already lost it. 

If he'd let himself think about this at all beforehand, it's Kai he would have expected to take it the worst, not himself. Maybe that's a little uncharitable to Kai, but it's still what he would have guessed. Mira taking things in stride is less surprising- even while they'd been playing the Hollow she'd been much better at rolling with the punches than either of them. In contrast, Kai still hasn't let 'maybe we're dead' go. 

But Mira is firmly holding it together, and Kai is more concerned with the way his body is failing him, and it's Adam who sits up at night and shakes as he stares, unseeing, out into the dark.

There's a little less pacing, now- the access to the treehouse is a rope ladder, and Adam pulls it in after them at night. When he starts to get up anyway, restless, Mira pulls him back down. She doesn't make him sit down- they don't make each other do anything they don't want to- but she doesn't let him drop outside to pace, either. 

Some nights she doesn't catch him. Some nights she and Kai are both too deeply asleep, and Adam slides and scrambles out of the tree to hit the packed dirt, hard, on his knees, and paces until daybreak because he deliberately doesn't bring the ladder with. 

He gets reproving looks from both friends those nights, but that doesn't stop him doing it. It doesn't make him feel better, exactly, but he can't seem to stop. 

They have to come down pretty frequently since they can hardly have a fire in the treehouse and they're living mostly off of fish. They've started to catch some squirrels and rabbits, and Mira is hesitantly trying to identify some edible plants, but it's primarily fish for now. 

"Is it weird for you to eat this?" Kai asks Mira one night, and Adam feels a little wretched for not having thought of that. 

Mira stares down at the fish and shrugs. "A little bit, but we have to eat." 

Do we? Adam thinks, but keeps himself from voicing. 

"Anyone remember how to sing?" Kai asks, staring longingly into the fire. "I feel like you're supposed to sing around a fire." 

"Really?" Mira frowns. "I feel like you're supposed to tell ghost stories." She glances up. "Adam?"

He shrugs.  "Like it's for cooking."  He's acutely aware, always, that there's a gap in their barely-there memories. Kai and Mira remember fun things, like singing and storytelling, whereas any of the far fewer things Adam can dredge up are more utilitarian. "I don't remember how to sing, sorry. Or any songs, for that matter." 

Mira sighs and stirs the fire. "And of course we don't know any stories. Man. I wish we had more to talk about, you know?"

"We could make up some stories of our own?" Kai suggests hesitantly. 

"About what?" Adam asks him.  "We have the same experiences, or nearly." 

Kai shrugs and doesn't look at him. "I was away from you guys for a little bit." 

"So was I, but running from demon dogs isn't really anything solid. Maybe we should split up?" Mira suggests hesitantly. 

No one looks happy about that idea. 

"Hansel and Gretel," Adam says at a sudden thought. "When we threw that witch in the over, I remembered Hansel and Gretel. Maybe all we need is a trigger for our memories." 

"Like what?" Mira retorts dryly. "We're dead out of witches and ovens." 

Adam sags a little in his seat, leaning into Kai, who only shifts to lean back against him. They've all been pretty free about physical contact as long as they can recall, but it's definitely become a habit by now- that reassurance that the people closest to them are safe and right here. 

Splitting up probably isn't an option, not really. 

Team cohesion. Well, they've certainly got that.


	5. got a fire for a heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm so happy other people are enjoying this! i, too, enjoyed the show but wanted more, so this fic was mostly me going 'but what next?' and running with it.

Kai, who doesn't really have the stamina to go hunting with them, takes to fixing little things around the treehouse.  He turns out to be just as adept at it as he was at fixing spaceships. He uses what they have lying around, or the sticks and rocks and, eventually, even vines that Adam and Mira find and bring back to him, building a pulley system and a fan and a bedframe and various other things to make their lives easier. He rigs a sunroof on the treehouse so that when he's too exhausted to go far he can still get some sun and fresh air. He builds spears and fishing poles once he has the supplies. 

Kai's just as torn up as Adam, but it manifests differently for him. 

They think whoever is monitoring them wants to encourage this direction, because they start finding deciduous trees. With a ready source of wood, they're more easily able to build tools; with tools, they're more easily able to create things. 

As soon as Adam has a spear he takes to carrying it everywhere. 

"Okay, we're starting to get a Swiss Family Robinson vibe going on here," Mira says when she comes back with fish to find the boys working determinedly on adding a wraparound porch without compromising the integrity of the treehouse. 

Kai leans precariously over the edge and blinks down at her. Without looking up from what he's doing, Adam wraps one arm around Kai's legs so that he won't fall.  "A what vibe?" 

"Swiss Family Robinson?" Mira blinks back, before her face lights up. "Swiss Family Robinson! It was a movie, about a family that got shipwrecked, and they ended up on an island and built a huge treehouse, no, more like a tree fortress, and there were pirates and-" Mira gets so excited that her words start to run into each other. 

"Whoa! Mira, slow down!" Adam laughs. "We'll come down for the fire in a bit and you can tell us the story, all right?"

Mira grins up at them, practically vibrating with excitement. The boys may not remember this movie at all but they enjoy listening to Mira tell them about it. 

She teases the story of the Swiss Family Robinson out over three nights, and by then their daily grind has ignited another memory in Kai. 

"Minecraft," he says. "We built tools to build a home and to build better tools. There was a game like that. Do you guys-?" 

Mira recalls it too. Adam does not. 

Mira slips into the river one day and suddenly remembers whitewater rafting, and Kai is chipping designs into the wood of the bedframe with one of the sharper rocks Adam's found when he starts to remember scraps of poetry- his handwriting is still shaky, but he carves the last lines of The Hunting of the Snark into their trapdoor. He doesn't remember the author, and he doesn't remember the whole poem, but he remembers that it was a long one and he remember several disparate parts of the actual poem. Enough to give Mira and Adam the general gist of it, at least. 

"For the Snark was a Boojum, you see," Adam reads out loud, hoping to trigger some resonant memory in himself. 

Nothing. 

Kai and Mira's memories are still terrible, riddled with holes and devoid of the most basic information about themselves, but they're getting bits and pieces back. 

Adam strains to remember too, but he still has next to nothing, and what little he does remember he's strangely reluctant to (afraid) to clarify.

After who knows how long (Kai had initially been carving tallies into the tree but he'd given it up as depressing), Adam says into the early morning light when they first start to wake up, "I'm not getting better." 

Mira's not awake enough to really answer him, but Kai props himself up over them both and says, "Yeah, me neither. I mean, differently, obviously, but like. I'm not any less tired, or any more hungry." 

"Do you think this is it?" Adam asks, staring up through the skylight that Kai's left open overnight. "You think this is as good as we get? I mean... do we just... live here, now?" 

"Dunno, Adam." Kai sounds tired despite having just woken up. "For all I know this is some kinda TV show now." 

Adam flinches away at that, cringing in instinctive reaction.

"Sorry," Kai says quickly.  "Sorry, I shouldn't have said that.  I doubt it, anyway, we're not that interesting." 

"No ostriches," Mira says, sitting up on Adam's other side with a yawn. "Swiss Family Robinson got ostriches." 

"And coconut bombs," Kai is quick to add, because he'd loved that part of the story. Adam's frankly surprised they don't have coconut bombs yet, but, well, someone- some faceless stranger with no real stake in their happiness or mental stakes- would have to deem them deserving of coconuts, first.

"There's nothing we can do about it right now, Adam," Mira tells him gently. "We know, all right? This sucks. It feels like we've been shoved into storage. But we've searched all over this place- it's just forest in all directions. This one's not a game; there's no goal to reach. So we just... live, I guess." She shrugs and reaches over to grab both their hands tightly. "We've got each other, at least." 

Adam squeezes her hand back and tries to smile. "Yeah." 

It's snowing, the day Kai remembers his parents are divorced. 

That's all he has to go on- he doesn't remember their names, or which parent he had lived with or how recently that had been, or how long they've been divorced, or any of the possible reasons why, but he remembers that they _are_ divorced. 

"Congratulations," Mira tells him, which Adam thinks is probably not what you usually tell someone who's just blurted out that their parents are divorced. 

Adam, who still only remembers bare survival techniques and nothing else of any interest or importance, doesn't say anything. He has nothing to say.

He's distantly aware that he's becoming more anxious and depressed by the day, but he doesn't know what he's meant to do about it. Kai and Mira try to help, but they don't know what to do about it, either, and he doesn't want them to spend so much time worrying about him. 

His friends don't entirely stop him from pacing even now, because no one wants to tell the others what to do, but they do distract him as much as they can every time they catch him at it. Adam is harder to distract than they are, unfortunately; Kai and Mira show preferences now, have interests now.  Kai likes to draw, and to write now that they can, and Mira likes fishing and hiking and reading (which is a bit strange when all she has to read is whatever Kai's written and whatever is in the journal, but she's sure of it).  Adam still doesn't have any preferences and the closest thing he has to a habit or hobby is pacing.

It's Kai who finds something Adam likes. 

"You always choose to go hunt," he points out one night, over the designs he's drawing idly in the dirt. "That doesn't have to be what you choose, but it is. If it's between hunting or fishing you head into the woods, and sometimes you'll go hunt even when we have enough food." 

"It's not really hunting, though," Adam says half-heartedly, watching as Kai's aimless scribblings start to take shape. "It's trapping. I just set traps, I don't, I dunno, run up and spear things." 

"Do you want to?" Kai asks without missing a beat. His drawing resolves into a crow before he scratches it out and starts to write. His handwriting is still shaky, like all of theirs, but Kai writes much neater than Adam can. 

Adam hesitates, long enough that Mira joins them. 

"What is it?" she asks without preamble. 

"I wanted to know if Adam likes hunting," Kai says, not looking up. 

Mira's focus shifts immediately to Adam, who feels wrong-footed and uncomfortable now. "Do you?" she asks him. 

Adam shrugs.  He can't meet their eyes. "Maybe. I was telling Kai it's not really hunting, just trapping." 

Kai throws his stick aside and gets up to move closer to Adam. "Yeah, but is it something you enjoy?" 

Kai's written _Rage, rage against the dying of the light; do not go gentle into that good night_ in the dirt. Adam stares at it. That isn't at all the kind of thing Kai writes, so it has to be something he remembers.  It's more in Mira's recently learned or remembered tastes though.

It could be something of Adam's, but he still doesn't know. 

He hasn't said very much to his friends aside from that one morning because he's genuinely happy for them. He's glad their memories are coming back, however tattered they still are. He is.

He still hasn't answered Kai. 

"Adam?" Mira, too, gets up to sit beside him.

"I still don't remember anything," he mutters at last. 

Kai slings an arm around his shoulder and Mira wraps an arm around his waist. "Maybe your memories are just slower to come back?" she suggests.

"That journal said this was never tested," Adam says, a bitter taste in his mouth. "Maybe it went wrong." 

Kai snorts. "Yeah, dude, we noticed that. We wouldn't be playing Peter Pan here otherwise." He gestures up at the shadowy  
treehouse with his free hand.

"I don't remember what Peter Pan is, Kai," Adam says dully. 

"That's okay, we'll tell you tonight," Mira says. "Adam, do you _want_ to hunt?" 

Again, Adam hesitates. Finally, he says, "No. Not really."

"Then you don't have to do it," Mira says, exasperated. "Adam, all you had to do was say so." 

"Someone has to hunt, though," Adam says. "You prefer fishing, and Kai..." Kai still isn't well enough for them to let him go off on his own like that. They don't talk about it, but they also take turns tagging along whenever Kai leaves the immediate area.  They're hovering and it's probably at least a little bit frustrating but Kai hasn't asked them to stop.  Maybe it reassures Kai as much as it does them. 

It's a good thing, too, because while they have an unspoken rule about always listening to each other's concerns and requests Adam isn't sure they'd be able to bring themselves to leave Kai alone.  He wants to think they'd listen, but he's stayed awake enough nights trying to come up with some way to at least know what's actually _wrong_ with Kai to suspect he'd have a hard time staying away. 

At least he hasn't gotten any worse, although living off fish and rabbit and squirrel probably isn't helping. 

(Whatever they're actually living off isn't helping).

"Okay, new plan," Kai says. "Tomorrow we all go hunting, get enough for a few days, and then we can hang around here  
and try to find something you _do_ like doing." 

Adam doesn't think that's likely but he keeps that thought to himself. There's no need to upset them. 

He has nothing he likes, no real preferences. They don't know for sure if that's due to his memory loss, but with the memories Mira and Kai are recovering, it seems likely. The two of them have more than just the flashes of memory; Kai likes to sleep nearest the wall, Mira prefers rabbit over fish. Kai genuinely enjoys carving. Mira likes to climb, to explore, to stargaze and especially to tell them any stories she remembers late at night- they both think she's making up constellations and inventing the parts of stories she doesn't actually fully recall but that's all right. 

Adam has a few things he _dis_ likes, but nothing he really enjoys, and nothing has been sparking old memories for him. At first he'd been willing to agree with the others that maybe it was just taking longer for him, but it's been far too long without a change.

Mira vetoes Kai's first few suggestions for the day.  "He'd know already if it was something like fishing or hiking, Kai, we've done that." 

Kai wilts a little. "Yeah, but... I dunno, I guess I thought maybe it'd be different if we were paying more attention to what we  
were doing." 

"We'll save trying that for the end of the day," Adam says firmly, before eyeing the river with trepidation. He's been swimming before- that, at least, is an experience they've all shared- but he can't recall if he enjoyed it or not. Mostly he remembers being startled by a giant octopus. 

Mira assures him that's unlikely here, although he didn't ask. 

He likes swimming.  He thinks he likes swimming. He doesn't actively dislike it, at any rate. 

"Adam," Kai says at last, while they've perched on a rock in the river, content for the moment to watch Mira fish on the bank. Adam's clothes are soaked- he'll have to dry out around the fire when they get back. Kai, more wisely, has eschewed his shirt and rolled up his pants. (Practical or not, Adam hadn't been able to bring himself to do that). Kai's still soaked through, but he'll dry much faster than Adam will.  

Adam shakes himself roughly before answering Kai. "What is it?" 

Kai, rather rudely, drops down to drape himself over Adam. Adam grunts, but doesn't move away. They were never shy about physical touch in the first place but the longer they've been here the bolder Kai gets. Not that Adam particularly minds, but it can be inconvenient. 

Kai shrugs, pressing Adam further into the rock. "Maybe you don't remember what it's like to like something." 

"How would that even work?" Adam returns. He shuffles further up the rock, failing to dislodge Kai. "Can you even forget how to feel something?"

"Can you forget everything, including your own name and how to read?" Kai challenges. "Come on, Adam, we've seen a lot of weird things. Is this really any stranger?" 

No, but it's more personal. Adam isn't sure he wants to admit that so he says, "And how would I know or fix that, Kai?"

Kai deflates. "Okay, so I don't know. There has to be something, though. What are some things you feel, I don't know, indifferent about?"

"Swimming," he says flatly, before sincerely thinking about it for a moment. "Listening to Mira's stories at night. Uh, your carvings." 

Kai latches onto that. "Okay, so, how do our stories and carvings make you feel?" 

"At peace, I guess?" Adam says awkwardly. "Calmer. I don't need to pace so badly. I can, uh, sit in one place for a little bit." Not for long, admittedly, but usually at least long enough for Mira to finish her story or to take a planned break. 

" _Adam_ ," Kai groans in exasperation. He rolls off of his friend and would fall into the river if Adam's arm didn't instinctively shoot out to grab him and pull him closer again. "You're an idiot." 

Adam considers letting him fall into the river anyway. 

"You like listening to Mira," Kai says. "I think you like my drawings, too. _That's_ what that feeling is." He punches Adam in the arm. "You idiot. Who forgets what it feels like to enjoy things?"

Not feeling all that great at this revelation, Adam stares blankly up at the sky. So that was what he'd been feeling? He was less restless and upset when he was around Mira and Kai, yes, but he hadn't truly considered that he was enjoying himself. It wasn't just listening to Mira or watching Kai either; he was more content when they were settling in for the night, or when he was helping Kai with some improvement to the treehouse, or when he was hunting or fishing with Mira. 

"It's not the activities," Adam says at last. The arm still keeping Kai from slipping loose tightens. "It's being around you two." 

Mira comes splashing up to them, several fish in one hand. "That's sweet, I guess, but probably not healthy." 

Kai snorts and rolls out from under Adam's arm to splash into the river. "Like we're the poster children for healthy. Hey, what else did you want to do?" 

"What else does Adam want to do," Mira corrects gently, reaching out to pull Adam off the rock as well. 

For the first time in a long time, Adam really thinks about it. Finally, with only the barest hesitation, he says, "Do either of you remember any dice games?" 

When they get back to the treehouse, Kai scurries up the ladder as Adam and Mira start the fire and begin scaling the fish, respectively. (It had taken a while before anyone remembered how to scale fish, and Mira taught Adam, but she's still the best at it). By the time they have a decent flame going Kai's returned with several mostly-even square blocks of wood and the knife-edged rock he favors for carving. By the time the fish are ready, Kai has several roughly finished dice.

"Those are going to essentially be weighted," Adam points out, because they're hardly perfect squares. 

Kai shrugs. "I work with what I have, Adam. We'll just have to rotate dice to keep it fair." 

Keep what fair, no one knows yet. They spend some time just looking at the dice, admiring Kai's carving, and throwing them to each other. Adam fumbles and drops one when Mira calmly points out that he's good at catch and that he smiles while they're playing. 

And then... Adam remembers a dice game. 

Slowly, pausing often to concentrate and recall how to play, he teaches the others.  It doesn't come easy to him- it's not like when Kai or Mira remember something, the way their memories come back in flashes and sensations. Adam has to struggle after his, reaching and reaching for something that seems determined to stay just out of his grasp, and every lapse in concentration costs him. Apparently the difficulty he'd had before in trying to remember what survival techniques he knows is the rule rather than the exception. It's a little disheartening that he's having so much more trouble than his friends still but at least he's remembering _something_. 

"I don't know what this game is called," he admits, several rounds in. Kai is winning, but it seems like dumb luck. 

"Does that matter?" Kai asks, cupping his hand over his dice and squinting. "Uh, two threes." 

"Three fours," Adam says. "I don't know? Names are important, I think." No one says anything and he adds quietly, "I know you guys use mine more than you really need to." 

"Liar," Mira says, revealing her dice and jarring Adam slightly before he remembers that she's calling him a liar as part of the game. She has two threes and a one, and neither Adam nor Kai has any fours at all, so Adam slides one of his dice into the middle before Mira continues. "We use yours exactly as much as we need to. We lost everything, Adam, our names are kind of all we have." 

"Each other," Adam points out firmly. "Besides, you know they're not really our names, right?" 

Mira shrugs as she gathers in her dice again.  "Unless you guys feel like coming up with different ones, they're what we have. Besides, they're essentially what we've always called each other now."  

Mira wins the argument and the dice game before they retire for the night.  This time, as they shift to get comfortable on the bed, Adam acknowledges to himself that he does feel much calmer when he can feel both his friends beside him. If he stays up a little longer than they do, just listening to the others breathe and letting himself match their rhythm, they don't need to know that. They've let Adam take the middle- Kai still prefers to be up against a wall, and Mira insists on being on the outside. He knows Kai is being honest but he suspects Mira just wants Adam in between them. 

It's for one night. He lets her have her way. 

(It's not for one night).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -it's Liar's Dice, they're playing Liar's Dice (which I've also heard called Pirate's Dice); my brothers taught it to me while i was recovering from a surgery and we thoroughly confused our grandmother while we played as both brothers had learned different rules.  
> -we watched Swiss Family Robinson a LOT as kids. i still want a tree fort.


	6. i'm not scared of the dark

 

The next day they find a muddied deck of cards in their usual hunting grounds and Adam's paranoia takes another violent upswing. 

"They _are_ watching," he says to Kai, displaying the deck of cards and running a hand through his hair, which is already a mess from the frequency of the action. 

"Yeah?" Mira says from behind them. Kai jumps. Adam doesn't. "We already knew that." 

Adam stares down at the cards.  Mira's right. They did know that. So why is it so upsetting to have confirmation? "I guess I thought... maybe they forgot about us." 

"No way, man. We're an investment," Kai says. "I don't know numbers, really, but they paid a lot for us. Too much, probably." 

Mira scowls and taps Kai lightly on the head. "Hey, Kai, we're worth plenty.  Don't devalue us." 

Adam's fist clenches unconsciously. 

"He's right, though," Mira says, turning to Adam. "They aren't going to just forget about us. They've got to make at least enough from us to justify initial cost, right? I can't judge either but it does seem like we're worth a lot to them." 

"Stop..." Adam has to stop and swallow, hard. "Stop talking about us like we're things. Both of you." 

He can't read the looks they give him. 

"Adam," Mira says, her voice strange. "They threw us in storage. You get that, right? We weren't... aren't immediately useful, and we were taking up resources, so they just. Threw us in storage. Like throwing toys in the attic. We aren't.. worth anything to anyone, right now. No one is coming to get us until we are." 

Attics, Adam remembers. He remembers rooms full of dust and cobwebs and unused furniture, covered in sheets until someone comes to look for something they need, or to look around curiously only to leave everything hidden away when they remember why they don't want any of it. 

For a split second, there's more than that. For a split second, there's a door locked from the wrong side, muffled shouting, a window that can be forced open, a treacherous drop- but even as he reacts and reaches instinctively for the memory, it's gone. 

It leaves him with the knowledge of what an attic is, at least. 

Slowly, he wilts, losing steam as rapidly as he'd built it. "I know, Mira. But we can't think of ourselves that way. We can't. All right? Kai?" He looks between his friends. "We're people, and we have worth. We can't forget that." 

Their hesitation is going to haunt him. 

Mira puts her hand out first, waiting for the boys to put their hands on top of hers. "All right. We won't forget.  We're worth something, at least to each other." 

"We're worth something period," Adam tells them both gently, because Kai is only frowning down at their linked hands. "Don't forget that."

Mira laughs weakly. 

"Okay, poor word choice," Adam admits. "You know what I mean."

 They're grateful for the pack of cards, in the end. They're probably not playing the games they do remember right- it's rare to remember all the rules, and sometimes the rules they think they know vary, like they learned different versions of the same game. Like with the dice game, Adam remembers cards if he really concentrates; he teaches the others poker, baccarat, and solitaire before he can't come up with anything else without risking a severe headache. It's still much harder on him to dredge up memories than it is on the others, and his memories fade again far more easily and quickly. 

At least time is passing easier now that the have games to distract them. Cards and dice alone are enough for them to play several different games, and now that they've realised Adam enjoys it they play catch whenever they can- they're all vaguely aware there are other games they could be playing with anything they can throw, but no one remembers rules. They don't so much recall dodgeball as rediscover it, only for Mira to remember it as an actual legitimate game two days later. The day Kai remembers what Dungeons and Dragons is is a godsend, although with only three of them it's hard to get much of a game going and no one is clear on the rules. Still, when they combine what they all recall with their limited supplies, they have another way to pass the time- and another activity Adam admits to liking, something that's still a big deal to Kai and Mira. Not so much to Adam, not once he's worked out that what really makes him happy _is_ Kai and Mira. 

The snow starts to melt. It's impossible to know how long they've actually been here, but in the game's time it's been months. Hunting and fishing becomes easier again. The days grow longer. 

Mira realises they look exactly the same as they had at the start of their adventure. 

"Our hair's not growing," she says conversationally one afternoon.

"Least of our problems, Mira," Kai points out, frowning down at his cards. "Man, I fold. I think this deck likes Adam better than me." 

"They're cards Kai, they can't have a preference," Adam reminds him, before adding with a grin, "Raise, by the way."

"Just- just take the pot, Adam." Mira shoves the loose collection of leaves and pinecones at him. Technically they're playing for chores, but since they divide those already based on ability and preference, it's kind of pointless. No one has figured out how to play poker without betting yet, though, so they bet anyway. "Seriously though. Our hair's never grown, and our clothes should be in pieces, but they're still holding up." 

Self-consciously, Adam picks at the shirt of Mira's that he's still wearing. He's honestly a little surprised the shirt hasn't met with any 'accidents' in all this time, but apparently whoever's in charge of them doesn't care what he wears. 

"Mira," Kai says. "Those are good things. I mean, I guess unless anyone wants to grow their hair out. I don't. Adam?"

"Nope," he says, packing up and shuffling the cards. "I'm good with this length." Thankfully. They hadn't been offered a chance to choose their clothes or names, he isn't going to hold out hope that they'd be allowed to change their appearances. Right now all they know they've chosen for themselves before this are the superpowers they no longer have. 

And then they do have them again, and that's worse. 

Adam wakes up slowly, much more slowly than usual- he's not sure why, because something seems wrong, and normally that would encourage him to  wake up faster. 

Kai's head is still tucked in beneath his and he can still feel Mira at his back and that keeps him calm but they are definitely not in the treehouse.  For one thing, whatever they've been sleeping on seems to be moving. He twists his head back as much as he can without disturbing the others and glances around. 

It's not the bunker. So there's that. 

It's a strange boat docked at a strange island instead, which is not thrilling, but it's at least not the bunker. 

"Kai," Adam whispers. "Mira." He shifts, stretching enough to dislodge Mira and freeing a hand to gently push at Kai's shoulder. "Guys, wake- whoa!" 

Instead of the gentle shove he'd intended, Kai flails upright with a gasp, hand flying to his shoulder as he locks eyes with Adam. "Dude, that really- whoa- whoa, whoa, whoa where are we? Mira? What's going on?" 

"I don't know," Mira says, wide eyed, using Adam's shoulder to haul herself upright. "Adam?" 

"I don't-" Breath catching, Adam shakes his head. "Um. Kai." 

"Y-yeah?" Kai says shakily, balancing himself on Adam's free shoulder. Unlike the other two Adam hasn't tried to get up yet. 

"Make-" Adam's voice fails him. He tries again. "Make fire." 

Kai doesn't even question him, just moves his hands in the familiar motions. When his hands spark he jerks backwards, dropping them in his lap and extinguishing them at the same time, and then he freezes. 

"We don't even-" Adam starts, but his voice comes out so uneven and shaky that he stops. 

"I thought we'd be back in the apartment," Mira whispers, putting words to what they all feel. 

It isn't that they want to be back in the apartment. That hadn't been enjoyable, to the point where they'd honestly preferred the false woods. It's that they'd expected some kind of break. To be thrown back into the Hollow without warning? They're not prepared for that. They hadn't know _to_ be prepared for that. 

Adam takes a deep breath and, very carefully, levers himself upright.  He's fallen out of the habit of controlling his strength, mostly; he has to _think_ about it now. "Let's... let's just get out of the boat, for now." 

The island's not very big.  It isn't very small, either, there are several structures built on it, but it isn't huge- they can walk across and around it easily. There are obvious puzzles everywhere, but they leave those alone for now until they've drawn more conclusions about where they've found themselves. Kai goes cautiously, shakily, airborne; Mira waits with Adam for him to return, then takes a lap around the island while Adam and Kai wait for her. 

"Nothing," she reports despondently when she returns, shaking herself in a futile attempt to get dry. Kai obligingly dries her off instead, which isn't a trick Adam was aware he knew. Or- that's not true, Adam knew about it, he just hadn't been awake for it before. Kai had done it for him when they'd thought he was dying. 

(Because he had been. For someone else's entertainment). 

Splitting up would almost certainly be faster, but no one suggests it. 

Like before, all they've brought with them are their clothes. This time, presumably because they've gone from one simulation straight into another, their pockets are empty even though Adam knows he had his dice and Kai swears he'd had the card deck. 

And Adam has his original shirt on. 

He scowls at it, but they don't have any other clothing anymore, and he's no more willing to go shirtless than before- especially since they're definitely being watched now. 

"Not it," Kai says from the doorway of the first building they check, staring in at the examination chair sitting incongruously in the small room. Adam's stomach clenches at the sight. "Mira?" 

"Uh, no," Mira says, pushing past them both and following the path further on. 

Adam's both grateful and ashamed that neither of them ask him to go anywhere near the chair. He doesn't think he could even if they did ask it of him. 

Then they find the library, and Kai is absolutely thrilled. Mira, too, is delighted, but she's not flitting around the room and picking up books and putting them down while shaking with excitement the way Kai is. It's adorable. A lot of what Kai does is adorable, but especially when he's happy. 

"What's in the books?" Adam calls, crouching down and investigating the fireplace instead. It's true they can all read again (they _hope_ it's 'again') but it's still Kai who likes reading the best of all of them, so they're not about to take the first real books they've found from him. 

"They're some kind of journals," Kai says, enthusiasm slightly dampened. "I mean, actually most of them are burnt to char, but the ones that are intact look like journals. About different... ages? Well, it calls them ages, but it reads like they're different worlds." 

"Huh," Mira says absently, scanning the rest of the room. She picks up a loose page next to a book laid out on a pedestal. "At least yours aren't falling apart, I guess. Maybe we can- whoa!" She falls back as both boys join her. 

No one says anything as the loose page seamlessly folds into the book. 

No one says anything as the book animates, playing a static-filled clip of a man asking them for... something.  To repair the book, maybe. There's too many gaps in dialogue to know for sure what he wants. 

"You know," Kai says, after a moment to make sure the book is done. "I never thought I'd say this, but I miss like, physics." 

"Yeah," Adam agrees shakily. "Be nice if the laws of nature stayed constant for a while." 

"This seems familiar," Mira says. "I think it's a puzzle game." 

Both boys turn to stare at her.

Mira shrugs, a little defensively. "We know I'm good at puzzles. This game seems familiar- I think I've played it before, so maybe I'll know some things, like the way Kai knew there were three witches."  She nods at the book. ""We have to put those back together, I think." 

"Those?" Adam says, before noticing the second book behind Kai. "Oh. There's two of them." Which meant this would take twice as long. 

"Actually, I think there's supposed to be three?" Mira says awkwardly. "I feel like one is missing."

"Great," Adam says. "Okay. Where do we start?"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess where


	7. you've never seen it

 

They still don't split up, even though it would make solving the puzzles quicker, even though by now they're relatively certain there aren't any enemies in this world. Adam finds a pencil- more like a charred bit of graphite, but usable- on the lowest part of the bookcase and Kai takes it and one of the books to write in as they go. 

It's a good thing because there's no way they'd be able to remember everything they find, even if Adam's memory wasn't... what it is. 

"There are dates on the wall in here," Mira calls from the end of a twisting passageway ten minutes later. She was the first  
one to move forwards, like always. "Kai, I don't think we'll all fit in here. I'll call them out and you write them down?"

"Sounds like a plan." Kai flips the book to write in an empty margin. 

The graphite crumbles. He and Adam both stare at it. 

"October eleventh, nineteen eighty-four," Mira calls back before Adam finds his voice. 

"Wait, the graphite broke!" He tries to pick up what remains of their only writing utensil but it only crumbles further. 

"Can you memorize them?" Mira's disembodied voice floats back. 

Adam scowls. "Funny." 

"I wasn't making a joke, Adam. There's three dates and three of us, so we'd each only have to remember one."

They agree that's for the best, but not before Kai tries to char notes into the stolen book instead. The book burns to ashes. When Kai reaches for another one to try again, Mira stops him. 

"We might actually need the information in these," she points out. 

They do, as it turns out, but not immediately. There's a lot of backtracking and investigating to do first. Eventually they have to examine the chair in the single room closely; Mira simply climbs in to look around while the boys are still arguing over who should do it. 

Adam's sure he doesn't hide his relief well. 

Each of them memorizing one thing at a time turns out to be an important system, because it seems like the clues mostly come in threes. Three dates lead to three star charts lead to three symbols leads to a portal into the next 'age.' 

When they find a room with a massive, comfortable looking bed, it's been hours. Kai throws himself onto the bed immediately and scrambles up against the headrest while the other two busy themselves investigating the room. By the time Mira finds another loose page, he's actually asleep. 

"Man," Adam says, straightening from the crouch where he'd been checking beneath a table. "Still? I thought, once we were back here..."  He trails off, because they're still not sure what's going on. This is definitely the Hollow, because they all have their powers back, but their powers have also been utterly useless here. Fire and fighting don't solve puzzles, and there haven't been any animals for Mira to talk to. 

"Yeah," Mira agrees anyway, sitting heavily on the bed and carding one hand through Kai's hair. Kai doesn't stir, already completely out.  "He wasn't like this at all during the first game, and y-you were the worst injured," if her voice shakes Adam isn't about to call her on it, "So I don't know why he's still doing so much worse than we are."

"Maybe it's like we thought at first. Maybe some people are more affected than others." Adam is still too restless to join them, so he occupies himself with  looking through a chest of drawers. He finds another loose page and shows it to Mira before pocketing it. "I think he's the youngest of us so maybe he's just taking it worse."

Mira eyes him speculatively. "What makes you think he's younger than us?"

"I, uh..." Adam falters. The actual answer is 'because I want to protect him more' but he's not sure how Mira will feel about  
that. 

Luckily Mira take pity on him. "Yeah, I know actually. I get that too." She settles herself against the headboard, pulling Kai around so that his head ends up in her lap.  He doesn't wake up. A few weeks ago (months ago?), that would have been cause for alarm, but they're used to how deeply Kai sleeps now. "I mean, I want all of us to be safe, but it's... different." 

Adam thinks half-heartedly of their 'we don't discuss Kai unless Kai is awake' rule. He thinks this is probably an exception. He thinks he definitely isn't going to be able to put Mira off any longer. 

"It's Kai you like. Isn't it." Mira's voice is very quiet. She's staring down at Kai, her long hair hiding her face. 

Adam struggles to find words. "I like... both of you, actually. A lot." 

"But differently." 

"Yeah, but..." He trails off, frustrated, and turns to pace with a groan.  "Not the way you think. I like you _both_ ," he stresses, but he can't figure out how to express the rest of what he feels. "Not... Yeah it's different, because _you're_ different, but it's not. I don't like one of you better than the other, or anything." 

Mira's silent for a moment. "Do you want to kiss Kai?" 

Adam's pacing stumbles to a halt. 

"Because that's okay," Mira says softly, "If you do. I kind of want to, too." 

He finds words again. "How can- we can't both-" He falters. "Can we?" 

She laughs, a bright, piercing sound that makes him shiver and step closer. "I don't know. I don't know how this works," she grins. "But I know that we can try." 

Adam smiles reluctantly back. 

When he does join them on the bed, he presses in close to both his friends before closing his eyes, trusting Mira to take the next watch. The gentle rise and fall of both his friend's breathing helps him fall asleep. 

They make much better progress the next day. Kai treats them to baffled looks when they're both more affectionate than usual but he definitely doesn't object. In fact, he seems to take it as permission to be more physical with them both, throwing himself into Mira's arms or deliberately hanging off Adam's back when he'd have been more reserved before. It's a  good change for everyone.  Besides being simply more relaxed it's easier. They don't have to stop and rest for Kai; Adam's more than strong enough that Kai can ride piggyback and doze for a while. 

They've made it to the third 'age' when Mira stops, partway through a complex puzzle involving an elevator, and says with an air of dawning comprehension, "It's a calibration test." 

Adam blinks at the puzzle. "I'm pretty sure it's not." 

"Not this." She straightens up. "Well, this, but-" She waves her hands, gesture encompassing the whole area. "All of it, the whole game. It's a calibration test." 

"To calibrate what?" Adam asks, slowly, feeling Kai's legs bunch beneath his hands as the other boy stirs. "Us?" 

"Yeah, us. I think this is their idea of transitioning us back to the Hollow." She looks back at the elevator puzzle, mostly solved.  Well, mostly solved for this particular solution- this is one of the puzzles that's been requiring them to return and re-activate it. "I think they wanted to test us."

Adam thinks of waking up in the boat, confused and alarmed. "Some transition." 

Mira snorts bitterly. "Never said they were good at it.  Hey, Kai, you with us?" 

"Think this is some sorta cognitive thinking test?" Kai asks, making no move to get off Adam's back. 

"Yeah I do," Mira says on an exhale. "I think that's why it's all puzzles and no one else is here. Their amnesia mechanic backfired, right? So maybe this is an evaluation." 

"Of the way we think," Adam says flatly. "What they're evaluating is the damage _they_ did to _our_ heads." They're still each memorizing one specific part of each three-part clue they find, because none of them can remember three at once, and Adam in particular struggles even with one if they take too long. He doesn't know what his memory was like before but there's no denying that it's terrible now. He has only Kai and Mira for comparison, but they have much better recall than he does, and they remember things to start with. They don't have to grasp futilely after memories that slide away from them in the end anyway. 

...as far as he knows. 

"Yeah, well. They did a lot of damage," Mira says. She abruptly sounds exhausted. "But we still have plenty of critical thinking skills."  She nods down at the puzzle. "That's what this is about." 

"They think they could have screwed up the way we _think_?" Kai says, sounding more awake by the second. "They think they, what, gave us brain damage?" 

"That's sort of what amnesia _is_ , Kai," Adam says, stretching as his friend slides down to stand on his own. "How did you think it worked?" 

Kai crosses his arms and scowls down at the floor. The expression doesn't look right on him. "I don't know, I guess I just didn't think about it much." 

"Seriously? I think about it all the time." Mira looks pained. She sets down whatever she's holding (which is its own mystery, actually, since the elevator doesn't exactly have the kind of parts that can or should be removed) to duck under Adam's arm and huddle close to both her friends instead. "Minds are so complicated and they messed with ours. Think about it this way- these puzzles are way less complicated than we are, and if you take a single piece out," she tilts her hand to display just such a piece, "Then they don't work." 

Adam slumps against the wall, letting himself slide to the floor, and Kai drops down beside him without prompting. They might be in a dark, tiny, creepy room with nothing around them but the elevator, the puzzle atop it, and Kai's fire, but at least there's no imminent danger. "Okay. So now what? Why should we jump through their hoops?" 

"Well, after our recent adventure in the lost woods?" Mira, too, takes a seat on the floor, but facing them. "I'm pretty sure they can just keep us here. You know. Indefinitely.  And while I don't especially mind having something to do, I don't actually want to live here." 

"Yeah, no," Kai says. "Some of these places are creepy." He punctuates that by flaring the fire to throw shadows around the tiny, darkened area they're currently in. It's definitely not the most unsettling location they've found, but it's also not particularly pleasant.

"I don't want to jump through their hoops, either, though," Adam says stiffly. 

Mira shrugs. "I think we have to." 

They don't bother to get up for a while, opting to sit together on the floor for a bit and... not brainstorm, because they don't really have options. They talk about the game a little bit but, somewhat surprisingly, there's not much of interest there. They've collected several more loose sheets of paper, but they haven't bothered to return them to their respective books yet, so they're still not too sure what their goal is. Kai admits he's just happy to be out of the underwater rooms from a previous section and Mira teases him for it. Adam rests his head back against the wall and closes his eyes to listen to his friends. Like the night before, he lets their voices lull him into a doze. 

Traveling through this game hasn't been as draining as Weirdie's portals, although this game also includes a teleport mechanic. The linking books it uses are hardly comfortable but they're not outright exhausting. Actually solving the puzzles, though, is strangely tiring and Adam has been driving himself absolutely mad with anxiety for months. He's not about to refuse a moment to rest. Just before he drops off he feels Kai lean farther into his side and hears Mira laughing at something. 

When he wakes up Mira tells him they've decided to take a break and put what pages they have back in the books from the beginning of the game.  Adam is pretty sure what they were just doing constitutes taking a break, but he's not going to tell her that, so they make their way back to the library. 

The man trapped in the red book tells them to fetch the red pages and that they can't trust his brother in the blue book. The man in the blue book tells them to fetch the blue pages and not to trust his brother in the red book. 

"Okay," Adam says once both books are firmly shut again. "Does anyone else miss Benjamin and Benjamini?" 

"Right now I'd settle for the cyclops," Adam says grimly. 

"I'd take the horsemen.  At least they were honest.  Come on, we'll just get the pages for both books before we make a decision."  Mira tugs them both out of the library to find the next puzzle. 

Their powers aren't a lot of help in this game, but they aren't completely useless either. Mira bypasses steps on the few puzzles that are underwater while Kai's flames take the place of the flashlight they don't have. Adam is less useful here, but there are some pieces of machinery that are old and reluctant to work that are helped along by brute force (though he has to be careful not to break anything). Kai can also reach areas before they're probably strictly supposed to be able to. Sometimes that results in them chasing dead ends (more than a few things that look important turn out to be red herrings), but more often it's a useful shortcut. They're solving faster again both because they have a system worked out and because they're growing more used to the ways the puzzles tend to be set up. 

"You sill think there's a third book somewhere?" Kai asks Mira. 

"You trust either of the ones we have right now?" she returns. "At this point I'm _hoping_ there's a third one."

"I don't trust them," Adam says absently as he boosts Kai up a ladder. 

From the top of the ladder Mira scoffs. "Adam, you can count the people you trust on one hand. Someday you'll have to include someone other than us." 

Adam doesn't think that's possible anymore but he doesn't see the need to point that out. He doesn't want to consider it too closely for himself, anyway. 

They take another break when they reach a village in the trees, but this one is more because they're fascinated with their surroundings than out of any actual need to pause and regroup. Adam had thought their own treehouse was pretty impressive. This world (age) puts it to shame. It's honestly pretty cool- the lower level is just simple wooden bridges connected barely above the trees, which look deciduous and are spaced like it but are growing more like a mangrove swamp (according to Kai, the only one of them who remembers mangroves), but the upper level is multiple treehouses connected by more wood and rope bridges. The bridges are narrow enough that Mira opts to swim on the lower level but Adam thinks wider bridges would probably have a different effect anyway. 

It also makes Kai remember something, though they don't realize how significant it is at first. 

"Huh," Kai says, climbing carefully up a narrow, spiraling staircase around a tree- he's agreed that this isn't a great place to use his powers. "Why does this particular village seem to exist in so many different games?" 

"The Hollow didn't have it," Adam says, confused. "And the last place didn't have villages." 

"No, he's right," Mira says. "There's a tree village in a lot of them. Or a village on the water made out of, like, rafts, which is functionally the same place." She leans precariously over the edge of the stairs and looks down. "Also, this is both, really. Or would be if it had like... people in it." They're pretty positive by now that the two brothers in the books killed any people that might have been there. The two each blame each other, but seriously they're both extremely shady. 

"I know, right? What collective bit of human consciousness put that same village in so many... different..." He trails off.

"Kai?" Adam asks worriedly. "Mira?" 

"Different games," Mira says. "We remember multiple games with a similar area.  So we've both _played_ multiple games with a similar area." 

Adam doesn't even realize they're waiting for him to say something before they've gotten to the first treehouse. It's been quiet, so he says, "You too are usually a lot more talkative," before falling silent himself as he meets Kai's unreadable expression and Mira's sympathetic one. "Oh. Guys, it's nothing.  Maybe we just didn't care for the same games, or something." 

"That is one of the very few things we have evidence _against_ , actually." Mira claims the bed first this time, even though it's nowhere near dark and not that long since they've rested. "Adam, seriously, we know you're not okay." 

"I'm _fine_ ," he says defensively. "Come on, let's keep going.  There can't be much more, right?  Let's just finish this game and prove to... them, I guess... that we're not broken or whatever." 

Kai throws himself down onto the bed and wriggles closer to Mira. "What, nope, sorry, didn't catch that. Invalid, remember, gotta rest pretty frequently, you should give it up and get over here with us." He flops onto his back, landing awkwardly halfway over Mira's torso, and sticks out his tongue. "Nyah." 

Adam takes an involuntary step forward.  "You're not an invalid." 

"Ding ding ding!" Kai rewards him with two thumbs up.  "I mean, you're actually wrong there, but you're getting the point." 

"That doesn't make any-" Adam sighs. "I'm just going to stand watch." 

"Hey, stay in here," Mira says sharply when Adam makes to go back outside. 

He glances back at her. "Why? I'm going to be on watch. It's more efficient for me to be outside." 

She scowls and sits up, pushing Kai off herself in the process. He immediately makes himself comfortable beside her instead and blinks up at Adam. "Because I don't like it when I can't see you both."

That takes the wind out of Adam's sails. Deflating, he does join them, although he sits on the edge of the bed. 

Well, he tries to. Both his friends reach out and pull him down between them, even though that means Kai has to awkwardly squirm to one side to make room. 

"Hey," Mira says, as she settles herself more firmly upright against the headrest, reaching behind Adam to wrap one arm around Kai. She settles her other hand on Adam's shoulder.  "We want to protect you, too, you know."  

Adam shifts, but with her on one side and Kai on the other he can't go very far. "You shouldn't have to." 

"Dude, none of us should have to be dealing with any of this," Kai points out. He's curled onto his side, hands buried in Adam's shirt in a way that he'd still been too self-conscious to do even a week ago. Apparently he's just as unsettled as Adam about being abruptly back in the Hollow. 

If he's being honest with himself (which he tries to be, but he isn't very good at it), Adam didn't really want to be in a different room while anyone's asleep anyway. Three times now they've woken up in different worlds and the only reason he's not even more upset by that is at least they've always woken up together. 

They don't have a home. He refuses to acknowledge the apartment they've been imprisoned in as their home.  The treehouse had been better (worlds better), but it wasn't real, and they hadn't really chosen it either. They don't have their memories, and if they're not back by now they're probably never going to be. At least Kai and Mira have those scattered recollections, as distant and unconnected and ultimately unhelpful as they mostly are- Adam can admit, if only to himself, that he's long since given up on remembering much of anything important about himself. They don't have privacy- the deck of cards proved that suspicion true. They don't have _lives_ (he can still see the page of the journal that listed them as property, and sure, the journal could be yet another lie but he doesn't honestly believe it is), but they've had each other for literally as long as they can remember. 

Team cohesion. Sure. 

Adam blinks up at the ceiling, the knots in the wood oddly comforting after their treehouse, and sighs as he wraps his arm around Kai as well. The three of them are pressed way too closely together, to the point where it's honestly kind of uncomfortable, but he knows if he couldn't feel his friends breathing around him he'd already be up and pacing. He knows it's a nervous habit, he knows it worries his friends, but he can't seem to stop. 

He glances up at Mira, who's staring out the door, looking lost in thought. Mira has been taking everything much better than they have. She doesn't have panic attacks. Doesn't get up in the night to pace. She hardly even has nightmares, and when she does they're definitely not as severe as Kai's. 

It probably doesn't mean that she's okay. 

"Mira?" He keeps his voice low. It hasn't been that long, but Kai tends to fall asleep the moment he's presented with a comfortable surface. "Did you mean that?"

She breaks her staring contest with the empty doorway to look down at him. "What, that I want to protect you idiots? Of course I did." 

"And she's more competent than I'm likely to be," Kai, evidently still awake after all, contributes. 

"Kai, dude, you're plenty competent," Adam says, holding him tighter. Kai reacts by scrunching impossibly closer. "Don't be so harsh on yourself. Besides, still the only one of us with a non-superpower ability, right? Even after they messed with our heads you know how to fix things. It's really impressive, Kai. And you're better at these puzzles than me." So is Mira. Adam is, actually, nothing to write home about as far as puzzle-solving ability. He thinks. 

He can only solve one to every two or three the others manage each, anyway. Maybe it's more about how good they are than it is about him. Maybe. 

"Yeah, I guess," Kai says reluctantly. Adam can _hear_ the grin a moment later when Kai adds, "And I'm amazing with fire. Right, Mira?" 

She laughs. "Yeah, you're on fire, Kai. Super cool." 

"I think you mean hot." He headbutts Adam, laughing. 

"Actually," Mira says, suddenly sounding forced casual, "I think you're more cute than hot.  Right, Adam?" 

He swallows hard, heart pounding. Sure, Mira isn't the kind of person to sit back and wait for things to take a course, but he'd still thought he'd have more time than this.  

But he won't lie to his friends.  ""Uh, yeah. Cute," he stammers out, acutely aware of every point of contact between himself and Kai, and even himself and Mira. They are _way_ too close for this conversation but there's no way Adam can get more space between them unless he's willing to shove them off the bed. 

Since he's not, but he also feels a little bit like a broken wind-up toy after getting those words out, Mira takes over. Her voice is gently teasing as she says, "We both think you're pretty cute, Kai." 

Adam can't see Kai's face from where he is but he can picture it perfectly as Kai blusters through an answer. "I, uh, of course you do. Yeah." Then, more weakly, "Adam's the hot one, right?" 

"You're an idiot," Adam tells him. 

"But you think I'm cute anyway," Kai says, voice gaining confidence. 

Adam sighs. "Don't let it go to your head. Please." He doesn't think he's imagining that Kai's hands curl tighter into his shirt, that Kai himself is burrowing closer again even though there's no space left.  He knows he's not imagining the press of Mira's hand on his shoulder.  "Mira's right, but I, uh...." He trails off, not sure how to put his misgivings into words. 

Luckily he doesn't have to. "The invisible voyeurs," Mira stage-whispers dramatically, flipping off the doorway with both hands before resettling them on the boys. Adam snorts involuntarily. 

He turns onto his side to hug Kai back before he falls asleep. Mira's hand lifts briefly, but resettles while he's still awake. 

Adam still can't bring himself to do much more than that, not with the knowledge that they're being watched always lurking in the back of his mind, but it's a start. 

They win the game the next day. (It's strange to realize they've only ever had day/night cycles when they _are_ in games). It's kind of anticlimactic. They do find a third book, a green one, and they all (correctly) assume it's the one they're actually supposed to solve. When they do, they're transported first to a new 'age' that is clearly the last level of the game, and then- 

"Oh come on," Adam groans, clawing his way up the wall and glaring around the bunker. For once, Mira and Kai are already awake, although they look just as annoyed as him. 

"We already know the game, what fun is this for anyone?" Kai gripes before both the others shush him frantically. 

"We don't know how they wiped our memories the first time," Mira points out as she starts to investigate. There's no typewriter this time, which means they don't have a starting point, but there still has to be an exit somewhere- this is entertainment, no one wants to watch them starve to death in a barren room. 

They hope. People have proved consistently darker than their hopes. 

 

 


	8. look so easy

It's different, this time. That makes sense, because who wants to watch the same game again, but it does make it harder for them. There's no shack and no demon dogs.

 There is, instead, an entire prison island outside their bunker.

They don't discover that right away, though. There's still a vent, and still a drain- but there is very definitely no typewriter anywhere.  There's nothing in the room but them, and even their pockets are disappointingly empty (not that they've ever found much of use in them.  Names are good to have, but they won't ultimately get them out of this room, or out of this game). 

"Okay. I officially have no clue," Kai says, dropping cross-legged to the ground with a groan after ten minutes of searching the stubbornly bare room. "Anyone?" 

Mira looks doubtfully up at the vent. "Climb? These walls aren't... well, they're not _totally_ smooth, at least."

"We're idiots," Adam mutters in realization, before raising his voice. "Kai, can you fly with a passenger?"

He looks doubtful.  "Um, maybe. Not comfortably. Or, you know, very safely, Adam, still fire?" Despite his words, Kai's considering gaze darted around the cell.

"Can you get me to the vent?" Adam asked patiently. 

Once he's said it, the others catch on. It's just as messy and imprecise as Kai warned and they're definitely going to need to look for some sort of burn ointment when they get to the shack. Kai gets Adam up long enough for Adam to punch the vent out again, then drops him, then manages to fling him into the vent and to do the same for Mira before awkwardly launching himself in after them so they can go ransack the shack for supplies. They've long since decided to try for more in the way of supplies this time around. 

Except there is no shack. 

Well, maybe there is, somewhere. It's not outside the vent. The vent leads to another cell, and they opt to keep going because what use is that, and then another cell, and another, and they crawl single-file through the narrow vents past a total of ten oddly unoccupied cells before reaching what looks like a common area. It also does look occupied.

"Huh," Adam whispers, currently at the dead end at the end of the vent.  "Well they're not minotaurs. Or spider  
people." 

"Speeple?" Kai asks.

"I have no idea how you just managed to pronounce that," Mira tells him before Adam shushes them both. 

"Look," he says, backing up as much as he can and gesturing outside the vents. 

The guards probably wouldn't hear them anyway but it won't hurt to be careful. There are three of them, all human men, and they're playing cards around a rickety table and paying no attention to their surroundings. Considering none of the cells have actual doors, that's probably not as stupid as it seems. 

"There's a door just past them," Mira whispers. 

Adam nods. "We should wait for a while and see if they leave." 

The three of them settle in the vents, pressed close to each other and breathing slowly and quietly. The noise the three men make, laughing and chatting in low voices, covers any sounds Adam and his friends let slip.  Adam doesn't recognize the language, but he'll ask Mira what they've saying later in case any of it is important or useful. 

Finally, finally, one of the men gets up and leaves. The other two stretch, pocket handfuls of gold that they presumably won in the card game, and then one of them kicks back the legs of his chair and lights a cigarette. 

The other one, in  a luckier twist than any of the kids are used to, also leaves. Mira taps Kai and gestures to the remaining  
man's lit cigarette. 

Kai lights up- literally lights up, both hands on fire in the moment that the cigarette flares and the man lets out a stream of words that can only be curses. Mira winces. The man tries harder to put out his cigarette, only for first his sleeves and then the hem of his shirt to also burst into flames. Kai looks proud of himself. With a last vehement curse, the man finally  gives up and runs out of the room. Adam wastes no time knocking the vent cover out of the way and slithering out, bracing for the landing and turning to help both his friends once he's firmly on the floor. Kai doesn't much need it, though he's now far more careful with his flames. 

"Let's get out of here before they come back," Adam says quietly after he's steadied Mira. 

"I hate stealth games," Kai mutters, then looks startled. "Oh hey, I'm actually sure of that." 

"And I'm happy for you but _keep it down_ ," Adam stresses as he looks out the door. The corridor is clear, and the path winds ever so slightly _up_ , so he waves both his friends past him and takes up a rearguard position as they head for the surface and what they hope is an exit. 

It's not. Kai throws himself backwards into Mira and throws up a fire shield in almost the same motion, while Adam moves past them both to punch the guard they've startled by coming around a corner. The man goes down like a heap of bricks and Adam shakes fire off his fist with a wince before giving his friends a jerky nod to get them all moving again. 

"You, uh, you think he's okay?" Kai asks nervously as they edge past the downed guard. 

"I hope not," Mira mutters and kicks the guard as she passes. 

Adam doesn't think she's going to tell them what the men were talking about before. 

The corridor twists again and splits. Kai takes the path that continues up, staying in the front with his fist raised and fire dancing on his fingers. For maybe the first time that Adam can recall he actually looks intimidating. 

Then he trips and Mira has to catch him before he lands on his face. 

The other two guards must have taken a different path because they don't run into them anywhere. Eventually, the stone corridors come to a halt at a massive gate and the three of them exchange uneasy glances. 

"Look for a switch," Adam mutters. "I'm not throwing any wrenches at it." 

Mira snorts, but she does start examining the wall next to the gate. Kai takes the other side, so Adam starts to check the rest of the room. He's just gotten to a strange tapestry on the wall (it has a dragon, and he really hopes it isn't a new iteration of Colrath, because if the tapestry is to scale then the dragon it depicts is terrifyingly huge) when he hears Mira's faint exclamation. 

Moments later the gate begins to grind upwards, tortuously slow. 

Adam drops into a fighting stance behind his friends but it proves unnecessary.  Wherever the other guards are it's evidently not in hearing range.  

They stop the gate when it's high enough to safely duck under, not wanting to risk attracting attention with the noise, and then they immediately scramble beneath it and off to one side to catch their breath. 

"Well," Mira says as they scan their surroundings. "This is new. Think the storm's a permanent feature?"  She nods at the lightning flashing on the horizon, illuminating a choppy sea.  The lightning is moving rapidly closer. 

"I can state with actual confidence that I did not sign up for this," Kai says. 

Adam sighs and starts forwards. "Come on, let's just.. .let's just go find a boat." 

"And then what?" Mira asks, even as she follows carefully after him.  The -prison, he guesses- is built on nothing but rock and it's slippery with rain and the spray from the ocean. "Adam, we have no idea how close the nearest land is."

"Then it's a good thing this isn't real," Adam says shortly. 

"Still feels real," Kai mutters. He looks apprehensive, darting glances at the approaching storm. "I'm with Adam, Mira,  
let's get out of here first and _then_ worry about the rest of it." 

"Do you remember Castaway?" Mira demands. 

"I don't know what that _is,"_ Adam snaps, before taking a deep breath. "We need to leave before more guards come, all right?" 

As he'd been hoping, the mention of the guards- and presumably, the memory of whatever they'd been discussing- makes Mira's expression harden. "Let's go." 

It's easier said than done. The gate they'd exited is built into a nearly sheer cliff face, and all the paths up and away from it are narrow and treacherous. They have to go slowly and single file. That's bad enough, when they all prefer to be as close as possible to each other, but then the storm moves in and they're shortly being pelted with stinging rain as the wind tugs almost maliciously at their hair and clothes.  

It's still a game. The wind could actually _be_ malicious for all they know. 

It feels as real as anything else, though, and if Adam and Mira are unhappy then Kai is miserable. He can't use his flames at all, and he's struggling to stay as far from the trail's edge as possible. It's a relief when they finally make it to the top of the cliff and see that there's a ship just on the other side of it. 

It's less of a relief that there are rather a lot of people visible on the ship. 

Mira pulls the two of them off to the side as much as possible and points to the ship's boat.

Adam shakes his head, but he can't communicate his concerns over the howling wind without giving away their position. Surely Mira's thought of the same thing- they don't have any supplies. 

She gives him a hard look that he can't interpret, then starts sliding cautiously down towards the ship's boat herself. 

Adam sighs and follows, feeling Kai shaking at his back. Adam wasn't conscious before when they'd been lost at sea, but he knows it wasn't pleasant. He wants to tell Kai they'll all be together and on an actual boat this time, but even if he could somehow make himself heard he remembers Kai's seasickness and doubts how comforting that would even be. 

Mira reaches the water. The storm more than covers the noise she makes as she swims over to the ship's boat and starts to untie it, and so long as no one looks over the side of the ship they shouldn't notice Kai and Adam splashing after her. 

Their luck holds and both boys scramble into the boat just as Mira gets it untied. Adam shoves hard against the side of the ship, sending them scudding several feet into the ocean and rocking the ship. By the time the shouts reach them, Mira's handed off a rope to Adam before diving off the boat. He hangs grimly on as she tows them further and faster out to sea- and as arrows begin to pepper the water around them. Kai's trying to throw up another fire shield but it's proving impossible in the rain; luckily, the wind is strong enough that none of the arrows stay on course. 

Mira gets them rapidly out of sight but continues to swim away until they're well out of the storm. When they're clear enough of it to talk and be heard again, Adam says, "That fire shield is awesome." 

Kai smiles weakly. "I've seen something like it somewhere, I think. Wish it worked in the rain." 

"Kai, take the compliment. It was awesome." He looked around. "Think this boat had any supplies in it?"

It has to be hours before Mira climbs in the boat herself for a rest. She blows wet bangs out of her face and leans heavily against the bow. 

"Hey," Kai says, waving an unwrapped bar at her. "We found rations."

"Good," Mira groaned, reaching for it. "I need them. Swimming in that storm was hard work." She bites a chunk off, chews it, swallows, and says thoughtfully, "I don't suppose there was a map anywhere?"

"No," Adam says flatly. "Which is bad, because this seems a lot bigger than before." 

"Noted," Mira says, grabbing for another ration, but then pausing and setting it aside. "I, uh, I need to rest, but then we've definitely gotta look for land. I'm afraid of just dragging us further and further out to sea and that's no help to anyone."

"Can you, like, find a dolphin and ask it for directions?" Kai asked. 

Mira paused. "Actually.. yeah, that's not a bad idea." She levels her gaze at him. "By the way, Kai, how are you doing?" 

"Huh?" Kai looks startled to be asked, which is odd, because they ask him all the time. "I'm...  fine, I guess."

"He is," Adam says lowly, meeting Mira's eyes. "He hasn't been so much as tired since we got here. He's barely even been seasick." And Adam doesn't particularly want to think of the implications of that. After all, Kai had first been ill in the apartment, and that was the only real place they'd been-

-assuming that was the truth. There wasn't any real reason the journal couldn't be lying to them, and frankly, everything they've experienced has felt equally real. 

Adam leans back against the side of the boat and looks over his friends. Kai looks like he's bitten into something sour. Mira looks thoughtful, tapping the edge of the boat and frowning. 

"You think the journal was true?" Mira says abruptly, just as Adam opens his mouth to ask the same thing. When both boys freeze up, she continues, "Because it's odd, if Kai's only going to be healthy in one place, for it to be _in_ the Hollow. I'd think you'd feel worse here, or that you'd only feel sick in the... real world, I guess. Why would it be here, specifically?" 

"That's... a good question," Adam says slowly, sitting up straighter. "Our powers work in strange places, too." He thinks back over the different worlds they've been in. "Maybe because the forest and the apartment weren't really games? Uh, in that we weren't trying to win anything, I mean."

"Maybe?" Kai says uncertainly. 

"It's kind of weird that we'd have our powers in that last game, though," Mira points out.  "It was like it was some kind of default. I mean, there was nothing there to fight. There weren't even any fish in the water, there weren't any people... That whole place was _just_ the puzzles, and we could cheat at more than half of them specifically _because_ we had our powers. Like we weren't supposed to have them." 

Adam rubs at his face. "Okay, but... that was definitely a game, right? I mean, it had portals. Ridiculous puzzles that no sane person would build. We were traveling through books. No way was that all real." 

"Do we know what real's like, though?" Mira persists. "We don't have very much to go on."

"We remember the laws of nature, Mira," Kai says, exasperated.

"Do we?" Mira says. "We forgot how to read and write, guys. That's pretty basic. What else could we be wrong about?"

"Physics, though?" Kai says. "You think we're wrong about _physics_? That's... alarming." 

"What about our lives is not alarming?" Adam asks him. 

Mira sighs and gets back up- very, very carefully, since the rocking of the boat is enough to send Kai clutching Adam's arm tight enough to bruise. Adam sighs and wraps an arm around Kai in turn. 

"I'm gonna go get directions," Mira mutters and slithers carefully overboard, barely making a splash.

The sun is beginning to set. Rather than let go of his friend, Adam tugs him closer with another sigh. "Let's just try to get some rest for now. We don't know when our next chance will be." 

He barely feels Kai nod before he's falling asleep. 

He doesn't wake again until the boat bumps gently up against something.  When he opens his eyes, Mira is leaning over them both, soaked through and grinning. 

"Found land," she says smugly. "It's another island, but I can see more from here. Some kind of archipelago, I think." 

"Arc a what?" Kai asks. 

Adam carefully pretends to still be waking up, not wanting to admit the word is unfamiliar to him, too. 

Mira looks between them both with narrowed eyes. "It's an island chain. Now come on, I'm starving, let's go look around." 

"Let's catch some fish, eat, and _then_ go look around," Adam counters as he climbs out of the boat. 

Mira waves him off and turns toward the treeline off the beach. "I've talked to these fish. I"m not gonna catch any of them." 

The boys exchange defeated glances, because Mira is far and away the best of them at fishing and she knows it, and then  sigh in tandem and trudge after her up the beach. Adam grabs what rations remain in the boat first, because they have no guarantee they're going to find anything edible here. 

Ten feet up the beach he turns around to go back and drag the boat well out of reach of the high tide line. 

Mira's pale when he returns. "Good idea, Adam, we don't want to get stranded." 

"No," he agrees, breathing a little hard. It's not from pulling the boat. 

It's kind of ridiculous, honestly.  They've been on various islands for days now. They've been trapped literally longer than they can remember. There's still something horrifying about accidentally trapping themselves here.  Maybe it's the idea that it would be their fault. 

Of course, it's true that it's possible the entire situation is their fault, but there's no way to know that.


	9. got a river for a soul

"Guys?" Kai calls from somewhere ahead of them, further into the trees. He sounds stunned, but not alarmed, so they don't run to him. 

He's staring into the forest. When they reach him, he lifts one arm to point, flames curling up it to illuminate what he's looking at. "Um.  I guess we _were_ being watched. Looks like the treehouse was pretty popular." 

There's a fortress in the trees. 

This city- and its size does justify calling it a city- outdoes the abandoned treetop village they'd found by several orders of magnitude. For one thing it's not abandoned- they can see people on the bridges and ziplines that connect the different levels and homes, some of whom appear to have leathery wings, some of whom have feathers. There are so many levels to the place that they can't actually see the highest ones. Ladders and rope bridges and sometimes just ropes connect everything together, some areas have landing platforms, and most of the roofs look designed to help someone reach the next level up.  It's hard to tell from the ground, but one particularly innovative area seems to have incorporated slides and monkey bars as well. 

"Whoa," Mira breathes. "This is kind of amazing."

"Think we can trust them?" Adam asks her quietly. 

She shrugs. "I have no idea, Adam.  But I know we have to trust someone eventually." She gestures at the village. "Besides... don't you want to climb, too?" 

He does, but that hardly seems important. "Never mind that. Do we think it's safe?" 

"No," Mira says. "I don't think anything is safe anymore. I do think we need to go check it out." She steps forward to throw an arm around Kai. "Besides, the place is flammable." 

Kai sighs. "I really don't want to light anyone else on fire." 

"But you will if we're in trouble," Mira teases him, dropping her arm to ruffle his hair instead. Kai ducks away, but slowly. Mira's voice takes on a more serious tone as she says, "But we don't want you to do anything you don't want to do, all right?"

"Okay," Kai says. "I don't want to enter the mysterious tree village full of winged strangers who, given our track record, are probably going to try and kill us.  You know. Assuming we're not dead." 

"Kai," Adam says. 

Kai groans. "Fine. Let's go look for a ladder." 

They don't find a ladder. After investigating so many trees they're beginning to blur together, they're starting to think there is no ladder. 

"Maybe they fly up," Mira suggests, checking a tree Adam's pretty sure he already checked twice. 

"Some of them don't have wings," Adam points out. 

Kai shrugs. "Maybe the ones that do carry the ones that don't?" 

Slowly, Adam and Mira turn to give him considering looks.

He holds up both hands, noticeably unlit. "Guys. Trees. The place is made of trees, they're kind of known for being flammable."

"Yeah, you're right," Adam relents with a groan before looking up again. "Guess we find one that looks easier to climb." 

That ends up taking them until dark, and no one wants to attempt the climb without daylight (even the first level is a _long_ way up), so they huddle together in the root system of the tree they've chosen instead. 

At least Adam can't pace tonight. There's too much risk of being seen. Which is stupid and he knows it, they're planning to interact with these people, just- on their own terms. Is that so much to ask for? It feels like they never get to do anything on their own terms. 

It' s never really fully dark, not like it was in the apartment before; even if it weren't for the moon and stars overhead, lights begin to flash on and off in the treetop city. Adam's not sure what kind of light it is, honestly- it isn't harsh enough to be electric, and it doesn't flare and flicker like flames would. More than anything it looks like a second set of stars. They have to talk Kai out of crawling out of their hiding place to investigate further.

And they still don't get to set their own terms, because setting a watch proves fruitless when a winged stranger looms over their hiding spot while Kai and Mira doze. 

She says something, startled and musical, and Adam shakes Mira awake without breaking eye contact because beings whose language they don't speak have not historically been good news for them. 

"Oh," Mira says, wide-eyed. The being repeats (her?)self, and Mira replies in the same strange musical language.  Adam shakes Kai awake as well while they converse, but shakes his head when Kai opens his mouth. Eyes just as wide as Mira's had been, Kai listens.

"She's offering to fly us up," Mira announces finally. "She says she hates to see us sleep out here when she has beds to spare." Mira hesitates, then says quietly, "She says a number of their flock have gone missing recently. This kind of sounds like something we're supposed to check out, guys."

"Okay," Adam says slowly. "One at a time, though, I'm guessing?" 

Mira says something to the stranger and looks surprised at her response. "She says she respects our desire to stay together and she can bring friends to carry us." 

"Team cohesion again," Adam murmurs, then shakes himself roughly. "Okay, so, let's do that."

"Are you sure?" Kai asks. "We still don't know anything about them." 

"They sound like a quest line, and quest lines are how we get out of here," Adam points out as the stranger flies off, presumably to fetch her friends.

"We don't know that," Mira reminds him with surprising patience.

"We don't know they're not," Adam counters. 

They might have argued more, but their guide returns with friends swiftly. 

Adam, personally, is not a fan of losing track of Kai and Mira even for the few minutes it takes to fly to a habitable level, so he's relieved when their destination proves to be on one of the lower levels. 

Mira's already deep in conversation with their apparent guide when Adam and Kai are dropped off. She waves them over as their guide's friends nod to them and fly off again. 

"Her name is Ri'ya," Mira says, gesturing at the first winged person who'd found them.  Ri'ya doesn't have the leathery wings they'd seen from the ground and that one of her friends had; hers are feathery, but in such shades of grey and black that they blend easily into the night. "She's one of the Aeyrie and this is their home. Sounds like they're all different birds and bats- the bats are who we were seeing earlier." 

"In daylight?" Adam asks. 

"Is that a real word?" Kai asks at the same time. 

Mira shrugs. "It's real to them, Kai. And Adam, really? Are diurnal bats what you want to focus on here?" 

Adam glances guiltily around the landing platform, the bridges leading off of it and the ropes and ladders stretching up to the next level, and sighs. 

"Yeah, thought so," Mira says dryly before turning to the nearest bridge. "Now c'mon. Ri'ya owns an inn, she wants to put us up for the rest of the night." 

The room at the inn has three beds. 

The three of them exchange uneasy glances before piling into the bed closest to the wall. 

Adam starts to get up to pace, now that they're not huddled beneath a tree, and Kai and Mira simultaneously reach out and yank him down between them. 

"No," Mira tells him sternly. 

Adam arches an eyebrow. "No?" 

"No," Kai agrees, throwing his arm across Adam and pinning him in place. 

"We have to trust someone sometime," Mira reminds him, throwing her arm across him as well so that he has to stop struggling to get back up. 

Scowling, Adam pushes against them both, but without being willing to test his strength against them he's staying where he is. "I trust you. That's enough." 

"Adam," Kai groans, rolling over and landing half on top of Adam. "We could not be more obvious. Stay. Stay here." He ducks his head under Adam's and blinks up at him through his lashes. "C'mon." 

"People are _watching_ this," Adam hisses, feeling himself turn red. 

Kai only folds his arms between them to make himself more comfortable on top of Adam.  "Yep. So people can be jealous of _me_ for once." 

Adam tests where Kai and Mira are lying on him again, but unless he's willing to risk hurting his friends he isn't going anywhere. Which, effectively, means he isn't going anywhere and they know it. "Why would they be jealous?" 

Kai goes still. Adam can _feel_ both his friends staring at him. 

"What?" he says defensively, shifting as best as he can only to realise Mira's latched onto his right arm and is curled along his side. 

"Adam," Kai says, voice muffled as he lowers his head into his arms- and consequently, into Adam's chest. "You're an idiot." 

"What?" Adam says again, less defensively and more lost. 

Mira groans and punches him, very lightly, in the arm. "All right Kai, you want to tell him or should I?" 

"You're a catch, dude," Kai says into his collarbone. He shifts again and his elbows dig pointedly into Adam. "Also, you're an idiot." 

"I'm not a..." Adam frowns and tries to prop himself up on his elbows. Kai and Mira both cling as he manages it. "I'm not a 'catch.'" 

"Don't disparage our life choices, Adam," Mira mutters against his side. 

"Yeah, Adam." Kai closes his eyes and grins up at him. He looks ridiculous. "Also, you're wrong. You've attracted a hundred per cent of your teammates." 

"There are _two_ of you." Adam tests their hold again. Nope, he's not going anywhere. 

"Yep," Mira says. "And would you look at that, here we both are! In bed. With an idiot." 

Kai snorts and settles more firmly in place, seemingly determined to sleep on top of Adam. "'Why would people be jealous,' honestly." 

"Guys," Adam says at last, finally giving up entirely on trying to get up. "You're serious?" 

"I'm serious," Mira assures him. 

"Hi serious, I'm trying to go to sleep," Kai says immediately. 

"He's serious too," Mira tells Adam. 

Kai's eyes crack back open. "Wait, wait, I actually had a question. You." He frees one arm enough to point at Adam. "You said no. Before. To Mira. So... now?" He tilts his head. "Why the change?" 

Adam doesn't know, actually. He hasn't let himself think about it in too much depth. And... "People are still watching," he mutters. 

"Let them!" Kai says fiercely. "As far as we remember, they always have been! I'm not letting that keep me from doing what I want."

"Kai, c'mon," Mira says. "If Adam's uncomfortable he's uncomfortable. Don't push it." Mira's his new favorite person, until she squeezes his arm a moment later and adds, "At least, not right now." 

"I'll tell you," Adam sighs. "When I know myself." 

"Ohhhh," both his friends say simultaneously before finally settling down. 

Five minutes of silence later Adam says, "Wait, who's on watch?" 

For the first night since they can remember no one stays up to keep watch. It proves unnecessary, since Adam and Kai are both awake long before their host. 

It's only just sunrise- Adam can't quite shake the feeling that he should be getting up with the sun (to the great exasperation of his friends, who do not share the feeling) and Kai had slept better than them both when they were still under the tree, so dawn sees Adam sitting on one of the other beds to talk to Kai. 

"We meant it, you know," Kai tells him quietly. 

Adam sighs and presses one hand to his forehead. "I know, Kai.  I'm... sorry I'm not good at saying it back." 

Kai waves him off. "Don't worry about it. We get it." 

Adam smiles reluctantly at him. "Well, I'm glad someone does." 

Anything Kai might have said to that is interrupted by a knock at the door and the musical trill of their temporary landlord's language from the hall. 

"Coming," Adam calls, moving instinctively to put himself between his friends and the door as Kai goes to wake Mira. 

He's glad he did when the door opens to reveal not just Ri'ya, but her two friends from the night before. 

"They want us to come with them to see... something called the Icarus?" Mira blinked, then groaned. "That seems familiar. I feel like that's corny, somehow." 

"Maybe we'll remember why when we see it?" Kai suggests. 

They don't. 

Ri'ya's two friends, who introduce themselves as Rydei and Higa, are there so that they don't spend the entire day climbing- the Icarus is at the very top of the city, as it turns out. 

They end up regretting missing the chance to climb up to it. Kai in particular squirms around so much, frantic to see everything he can, that Rydei nearly drops him more than once. Adam would expect that to dampen his enthusiasm (it doesn't thrill Adam or Mira) but it doesn't. 

The Aeyrie is elaborate. The area with the slides and monkey bars is its own _district;_ another such district has netting connecting everything it possibly can, another has bridges that swivel on their bases to direct to different platforms, and there are trees that have the largest spiral staircases Adam has ever seen (not that that's hard, but it's still impressive). He sees at least two different trees with staircases _inside_ them as well. Zip lines and ladders are omnipresent. 

"I want to climb everything," are the first words out of Kai's mouth when Rydei sets him down at the top. 

Adam laughs. "Later, dude. Let's... Oh." He takes a step forward and his heart falls. "Oh no." 

At the edge of the platform- the city's highest landing platform, according to Ri'ya- there's a sizable wooden podium with a hollow in it.

An empty hollow. 

The empty space where the Icarus should be seems to glare tauntingly at them. 

"Ri'ya says it went missing some time ago," Mira says from behind Adam, strained. "And then people started vanishing. When it's here, it creates... some kind of force field around the city, I think? It protects, somehow." 

"Okay," Adam says, still staring at the empty space where the Icarus should be, a bad feeling settling somewhere in his gut. "So what do we do?" 

An hour later he regrets asking. 

Mira refuses to translate the name of the structure they're in, but he and Kai are both pretty positive it translates to 'sacrificial net' or something similar. 

The net is attached beneath a hole in the middle of one of the lower gathering platforms and, unlike other nets around the city, isn't equipped to hold so much as a single human-sized being. It's essentially an elevated pit trap with an iron cover that Ri'ya and Rydei had locked into place. 

There hadn't even been a fight. Ri'ya and her friends had just dropped them in rather than bringing them back to the inn. 

"So," Adam says from the bottom of the pile, tangled around Kai and Mira both in a way that makes him reflect privately on how pleasant the night before had been in contrast. 

"No saying I told you so," Mira mutters, elbowing him in the side, probably not by accident. 

"Okay, Mira," Adam says, then adds pointedly, "How about, I seriously don't trust _anyone_ else?" 

Kai's too distracted to join in, trying to find a way to burn them out of the net without dropping them several stories below to their deaths. 

"That's fair," Mira mutters, scrabbling to turn over and sending the whole net swinging instead. 

Jarred out of his search, Kai glares at her. 

Mira holds up both hands (which drops her further onto Adam, who grunts in discomfort). "Sorry! Thought maybe we could climb out." 

"There's like... a metal _lid_ over this thing," Kai points out, incredulous. 

Mira scowls at him. "Which Adam could lift. If we can get up there." 

"I'm sort of stuck, here," Adam points out. 

"Well, we'd get out of your way," Mira returns, exasperated. 

"Guys," Kai says, exasperated, but also sounding scared. 

At his tone Adam immediately cranes his head around Mira as best as he can. "What is it, Kai?"

Kai points outside their trap in answer. 

Oh. 

Oh no. 

Apparently the dragon tapestry back in the prison _had_ been to scale.


	10. and baby you're a boat

The dragon doesn't even slow down as it soars past and tears the entire net free from its anchor points, it just grabs their net in its foreclaws and hauls them along with it.

"Whoa!" Adam gasps, breathless, as they're all tumbled into each other from the force of the wind. Kai shouts something as they grab for each other, linking arms and hooking their legs together, but whatever he says is stolen away by that same rushing wind.

No wonder people have been going missing. 

The dragon twists and turns through the trees at terrifying speeds, the net swinging and brushing against branches and vines but never quite hitting anything. Adam tries to keep himself between any looming trees and his friends as much as he can but it's impossible to predict where they'll be from moment to moment. They cross multiple islands in minutes. 

Adam twists to stare at Mira. They can't talk at this speed, but he knows his question is in his eyes, and the terror reflected in hers tells him that no, Ri'ya and the others hadn't mentioned a dragon.

He's pretty sure none of them would have stayed if she had, no matter _how_ cool the Aeyrie is.

The dragon doesn't fly for very long- at the speed they're going, it doesn't have to. It turns out to be a good thing for them after all that it's flying low because once it reaches a mountain, it slows to drop them, though oddly it then continues flying and leaves them there.

They go skidding across a stone plateau for what has to be several dozen feet. Adam manages to get himself between the ground and his friends at the last moment; he hisses through his teeth as he feels the flesh on his back ripping open in a dozen different places as it catches on rocks, as the net gets tangled up and flips them around and drags them to a halt.

"Ow," Kai says plaintively from the top of the heap- Mira must have had the same idea about getting between him and danger. It's proving to be a sound tactical decision, because Kai is already burning the ropes away from them now that there's no danger of falling.

"Everyone alive?" Mira asks, raising her head from the protective circle of Adam's arms.

"It's debatable," Adam groans, then struggles to sit up when Kai opens his mouth to respond. "No! No, Kai, we are not dead, don't start this again."

"I was going to ask if you were okay," Kai says. Unconvincingly.

"Yeah, he's not," Mira tells him, helping Adam upright. Her hands come away bloody and she winces. "Okay, I really hope that insane medicine still exists."

"Doesn't-" Adam gasps as trying to stand tears at the wounds on his back, then grits his teeth. "Doesn't help us right now."

When he stands up, leaning heavily on Mira as she kicks away the charred remains of the net, the remains of his shirt flutter to the ground.

"Nice look," Kai tells him, scrambling upright himself. With all their frantic twisting, Kai ended up with the fewest injuries, mostly several odd cuts on his right arm. "Very... I want to say romance novel, but I'm not at all sure that's true."

Mira has a freely bleeding cut on her forehead and is favoring her left leg, but otherwise looks unharmed. Adam's by far the worst off.

"Well," Mira says bracingly, looking around for a moment before carefully helping Adam over to a boulder he can sit down on. He reflects that it's a good thing they didn't hit it. "At least you hated that shirt?"

"Yeah, but I liked _having_ a shirt," Adam gripes, then hisses in pain when he sits down. He hunches forward with another groan. "Let me guess. There's no way down from here?"

Kai eyes them both, then says, "I'll go check."

When he's trudged away to investigate the area Mira sits down next to Adam, careful not to jostle him. "That was stupid, you know."

"Had to be one of us," Adam mutters. "Might as well be me."

Mira moves like she wants to hug him and thinks better of it at the last second. "Oh, Adam. You know we don't want you to get hurt either, right?"

"Had to be one of us," Adam repeats.

"I really, really hate that you're right." Mira tests her weight on her leg. It holds. "Any idea how long Kai will be?"

"Like two minutes," Kai's voice answers her as he wanders back, rubbing the back of his head. "We are way high up, guys. Like, even one of you at a time, I'm not sure I can get us all down." He hesitates, then says, "And Adam, dude, I have no idea how to fly you without hurting you worse right now. What were you thinking?"

Adam shrugs and regrets it immediately. "That I'd rather it be me than either of you?"

He can't read the look the two of them exchange at that.

Shifting uncomfortably, he glances at Kai. "You came back pretty quick."

Kai nods. "We might be too high up to fly down safely, but there's a cave system that looks like it might be a way down."

"A cave system," Mira repeats flatly.

"Yeah," Kai confirms. "Starts at the edge of the plateau, and I think I can see where it lets out way at the bottom. Uh, assuming it's all connected."

"A dragon brought us here, Kai," Mira says.

"Yeah, I was there?" Kai gives her a confused look.

"You don't think maybe that cave system is the dragon's?" Adam asks flatly.

Wincing, Kai says, "Well, yeah, but- and I really hate to say this, I mean, I _really_ hate to say this- I think it's still the only way down."

It is. Mira takes a turn to get up and check for alternate routes too, and Adam hates that they won't let him get up to check as well, but both his friends prove willing to push him back down when he tries and he's still not willing to test his strength against them.  He's never forgotten how it felt to slam Kai into that tree, accident or not.  It is strange to have to sit still and watch Kai pace but they have a point; Adam won't be any help to anyone if he hurts himself any worse than he already is.

"It's just the cave system," Mira says when she comes back. "No other way down but falling off, looks like." She looks grim enough that Adam's suddenly sure she found evidence someone _had_ fallen off. "So..." She looks around, then sighs. "Kai, give me a hand?"

Kai's suddenly at his side and Adam grunts as Kai tugs his arm up and over his shoulder, pulling him up with surprising gentleness. It still pulls at his injuries- it can't not- but the careful way Kai maneuvers, combined with the way Mira falls into leading them across the plateau, reminds him that his friends have done this before.

At least he's conscious this time.

Their footing is treacherous. No matter how cautious they are, there are inevitable little slips and staggers as they make their way to the cave entrance. Once they're inside there are even more pitfalls, some of them literal, and Mira pulls Adam closer so that Kai can light their way.

Adam doesn't know if it's just how Kai is reacting to having his powers back, but he no longer lights only his hands. Now fire wreathes well up his arm, just above his shirt, throwing shaky shadows across the walls and the walls into stark relief, and curls lightly down the side farthest from Adam.

There's only one path they can take. That's good in that they can't get lost, but bad in that it means if the dragon comes looking they're easy prey.

"For once," Kai pants, "I would welcome being able to get lost."

"No kidding," Mira groans. "Or, I dunno, some bats? I could use some helpful bats. Don't things live in caves?" She pauses. "Things besides witches. Right." 

Adam almost stops for a second, but reminds himself harshly that he's holding his friends back enough. "The people who went missing- did Ri'ya say if they had wings?"

"Some did," Mira says absently, ducking an overhang and forcing Adam down with her with a wince. "Not all- oh!" Her eyes narrow. "Wonder how the wings work with the dragon dropping people on a plateau."

"Seriously?" Kai steers them around a sharp bend, throwing a fire shield before them just in case. "Their wings are on their back. You saw Adam's back, right?"

"Sure, but what if they don't land on their back? We didn't." Mira tugs them to a halt long enough for the fire shield to dissipate and Kai to turn to lighting their way again. "Unless the dragon is bringing them some... where... oh, no."

Blinking away the flare from the shield in time for Kai's flames to illuminate again, Adam's stomach sinks.

The caves open up around the bed into a massive cavern. At the far edge, treasure glitters and shines, but closer to them the firelight shows them the grim remains of the missing townspeople.

"That's a lot of bones," Kai says shakily. "Way more than back at Tauros' lair."

"Please don't remind me of that," Mira says. "Here- let's get closer to the treasure while the dragon's gone. Ri'ya said it took the Icarus, right?"

Kai brightens- literally, his fire glows brighter. "And they said it's a shield. We can use it to keep the dragon away."

Their luck doesn't hold, because when does their luck ever hold? It wouldn't be entertaining if it did.

They hear the dragon before they see it.

They're not even halfway across the cavern when they hear the tail scrape against the tunnel walls, slowed down by hauling Adam along in a stumbling run.

"Guys," he gasps. "Leave me and run, I'll- I'll find somewhere to hide, just _go_ -"

"No," Mira snaps, hauling harder on his arm.

"None of your self-sacrificing crap," Kai agrees, narrowing his eyes and curling his fire around to shield their backs.

Adam reflects ruefully that no one is going to like this and plants his feet.

"Adam!" Mira snarls- and, gritting his teeth, Adam pulls away.

Then picks her up and throws her towards the treasure.

When he turns to Kai, the other boy's eyes are narrowing further. He plants his feet as well and turns his back to the treasure to raise fire-wreathed fists. "Oh no. If you want to play the hero again, you idiot, you're not doing it alone."

"Kai," Adam tries, holding back a snarl of pain- throwing Mira had wrenched his back even worse. "Go with her! If you get the Icarus, you can hold it off!"

"I'm not _leaving_ you, you _idiot,"_ Kai snarls back. "It's my turn to protect you!"

Before Adam can argue with him any more, Kai's feet leave the ground as he uses fire jets to catapult towards the dragon just entering the cavern.

"Kai!" Adam yells, raw and desperate.

But he doesn't need to worry, not yet. Kai banks sharply as he comes up on the dragon's right side, skimming past its long snout by inches and then diving towards its eye. He jabs towards it with his left hand, sending a stream of fire towards the eye that makes the dragon recoil so fast that it slams its head into the ceiling and sends rocks scattering down. Kai flips in the air to get out of the way before the dragon can recover.

"But you've already protected me," Adam says softly, unable to look away from his usually timid friend fighting a dragon for the second time. For him.

"Yes, and apparently it didn't sink in," Mira's voice says from behind him right before she throws her arms painfully around his waist.

"What are you-" Adam yelps.

Ahead of them, Kai curves around the dragon and accelerates hard back towards them. He doesn't slow down, just barrels into them both so that his momentum carries all of them across the cavern and into the pile of treasure.

It's not a soft landing, and Adam's back and arms scream in protest, but as soon as they reach the treasure a shimmering blue barrier springs up around them.

"I found the Icarus," Mira says smugly, helping Kai to his feet first before turning to Adam.

Adam stares at the barrier, his heart falling. "This was too easy."

Kai gestures at the dragon just outside their shield and turns an incredulous look on him.

"I'm serious," Adam insists, shifting and hiding a wince. "We've barely been here a day! And this isn't a weapon, or, or a key to leave, it's a _shield_."

"You don't think," Mira starts slowly, dread stealing over her features.

Adam steels himself and sweeps his gaze over Kai as well, drawing him in. "I think there's more than one quest this time."

The dragon roars and settles itself heavily onto the stone, scratching ineffectively at their shield.

Mira holds the carved gemstone that generates it tighter. "Great. Are all of them this easy?" she asks sarcastically.

"It's just a hunch," Adam says, nettled. Then he sags and rubs at his forehead.  "But I don't see how a shield is supposed to get us home."

"Ri'ya said it protects the whole city, right?" Kai says, turning to raise another fire shield behind the blue barrier. It's more the thought than anything now, but it also makes it harder to see the dragon eyeing them like snacks, so no one is objecting. "Maybe it's just supposed to give us a home base."

"That's..." Mira groans. "That would make sense. But if they think we require a home base at all, how long are they expecting this to take?"

"Let's worry about that later," Adam suggests when the dragon roars again. "Let's get out of here now."

Luckily the shield moves with them. Mira clutches it close to her chest as they search for another tunnel out of the cave, leaving Kai to both support Adam and maintain their secondary shield.

"You've gotten really good with your fire," Adam tells him as they scramble over piles of gold.

"Thanks," Kai says. "I, uh, thought about it a lot while we were in... well, anywhere I didn't have it, really."

"It shows," Adam says sincerely, then adds, "But I am surprised you're not picking up any of this gold."

"Yeah, no, I've seen Aladdin, thanks," Kai says absently. Then his face takes on the pinched look it gets when he halfway remembers something and Adam doesn't press any further.

Adam doesn't remember what an Aladdin is, but he also doesn't pick up any gold himself, just in case.

He has no idea how long it's been when Mira finds the tunnel. No one's sense of time was ever reliable to begin with, and the dark caverns are no help, but any time at all feels like too long with the dragon breathing down their necks. Adam's just grateful both that it hadn't tried to use its breath before and that it is the fire-breathing kind of dragon, meaning if he has to Kai can hold it off again for a bit.

There are bones in the tunnel, too, silent testament to others who'd tried to flee this way and failed. They're charred, which is oddly reassuring- if they're charred then they lost to the dragon, not to starvation. They didn't die lost and hungry in the choking dark.

Without talking about it they take the first left when they come to a split, then another left, then straight ahead. It's not until two more lefts and a right that Kai speaks up to say, hoarsely, "Wait, what are we following?"

Adam tries to duck his head to take a closer look at Kai. Up close, he's sweating with exertion. He's still maintaining their backup shield- it's taking a toll on him.

"The charred bones," Mira says softly. "The remains down the other passageways weren't burned- the dragon wasn't worried about them getting away. That makes an exit this way more likely."

"Dark," Kai mutters, before letting out a deep groan and hitching Adam's arm higher over his shoulders.

"I can walk, guys," Adam says, exasperated. "Really."

"Yeah, you do dumb things when we let go of you," Mira tells him, pointedly squeezing the arm she has around his waist for emphasis. "So at least until we find a way to heal you you're gonna have to live with us being clingy."

Adam doesn't answer her, but he can't stop the smile that creeps over his face or the warmth he feels at their obvious concern.


	11. you're the only reason

When they estimate they're halfway down they find a hot spring.

"Well," Mira says, surveying the gently steaming water. "We haven't heard the dragon for a long time now, and the Icarus shield is keeping any fire but our own from reaching us. We should clean our wounds while we have a chance."

Reluctantly, Adam settles down beside the spring as Mira reaches one hand in to check the temperature.

Mira jerks back as soon as her hand breaks the surface.

"Too hot?" Kai asks her sympathetically.

"No," she breathes, and raises one hand to the cut on her forehead- or rather, to where the cut had been. It's healing before their eyes. "It's a healing spring. Adam, get over here!"

"What am I, chopped liver?" Kai gripes, but he's already more than half dragging Adam to the spring. "Come on, idiot, get in."

"Is that your new nickname for me?" Adam asks, even as he does slide into the spring. It's deeper than he expects and he ends up drenched well past his waist.

It's not the easy healing he remembers from before. This stings and itches and, judging by Kai's arm when he slips in as well, leaves scars behind.

"It will be if you keep _being_ an idiot," Kai tells him, before scrambling back out to refresh the fire shield. With the way Mira is still hanging grimly on to the Icarus, that's probably not necessary, but Adam definitely isn't about to stop him.

Adam revels in how easily he moves as he climbs back out of the spring. Without being asked, Kai spares enough attention to dry everyone off.

"Here," Mira says, unwrapping a piece of fabric from around her waist that Adam hadn't even noticed in their hurry to escape. "I thought you'd appreciate this, so I snagged it back in the treasure room." She holds out a shirt.

Adam is shrugging it on before he even finishes looking it over. It's muted green, soft and worn with fringing along the hems and sleeves, and it looks like it belonged to one of Ri'ya's people but most importantly it's concealing. It settles the low-level panic that's been scratching at the back of his mind since he lost his shirt, dulls the terrible feeling of exposure that dogs him constantly. "Thanks, Mira."

"No problem," she returns, shrugging away the thanks. "You needed it."

He sighs, resigned by now to how easily she can read his discomfort. "Yeah. Now let's get out of here."

The rest of the trip down is blessedly uneventful, although they do have to take a brief break when Kai's fire finally flickers and goes out and Kai himself stumbles so badly that Mira insists they all stop until he recovers. As soon as Kai can summon up even small flames again they immediately resume their escape, none of them wanting to risk giving the dragon a chance to catch up.

When they do finally reach the exit Mira puts her arm out to bar their passage.

"Open space."  She kneels at the edge of the cave, just beyond the light that leaks in, and waves at the clearing just outside. "That dragon got the Icarus once, somehow. I don't want to go out there and find out it can, I dunno, get through the shield if it dives for it fast enough."

"Good idea." Adam kneels next to her and surveys the terrain outside for anything that might provide cover. They're near the forest, at least, but to get under the trees they'll have to cross an open plain that will leave them sitting ducks.

"Hey," Kai says, nudging them both and pointing. "Look, allies."

"Yeah, we need to work on your vocabulary," Adam says once he catches what Kai's sharp eyes spotted first.

At first glance they almost look like smaller dragons- drakes, maybe, or wyverns. But rather than scales, they have a fringe of green and yellow fur that stands up along their spines and helps them blend in when they hunker into the grass.  They have wings, but they don't look like they're for flying. Instead the creatures spread them whenever anything, cloud or tree or bird, casts a shadow over them; a learned reaction to living beneath a huge winged predator.

When one of them moves its head Adam can see that it has antlers that resemble tree branches, further helping to camouflage them.

"Mira," Adam says, watching as a smaller one- a juvenile, maybe- wanders closer to their hiding spot. "Do you think they'd let us sneak out under their wings?"

"I'll ask," Mira says, pressing close to the floor and compressing the Icarus so that the shield contracts around them. She wriggles closer to get the juvenile's attention, then calls out, a long, low call that doesn't sound human in origin at all.

Adam feels Kai press into his side as they wait for Mira to negotiate, very close to cuddling him, and looks down at his friend. Even after their dip in the healing spring, Kai isn't looking good.  He doesn't look like he did so often before, when he was exhausted from doing nothing, but now he looks like keeping them under cover has been costing him energy.

"You can drop it," Adam tells him quietly. "We've got the Icarus, and Mira's getting us help."

Kai grits his teeth and doesn't drop his flames. "Magic items can be lost. Or stolen."

Adam's still trying to figure out how to reply to that, and to Kai's all-too-obvious fears, when Mira waves them forwards.

The juvenile creature (Mira calls them drakmir, but who knows) has been joined by another, which is good, because they aren't all going to fit under a single drakmir's wings. As much as Adam hates to separate, even for such a short time, they don't have a choice.

Since Kai can keep himself under cover without the Icarus he crawls under one wing of the first drakmir while Mira and Adam take each side of the second one. They don't move quickly- they don't want to risk the creatures moving in an unnatural way and attracting attention, especially when they're already mantling their wings all the way across the clearing. Luckily it looks like the juveniles tend to do that sometimes anyway, judging by the rest of the herd's behavior.

At first it seems as though they're going to make it under the cover of the trees without a problem. Kai does, in fact, his drakmir staying with him into the forest so that they turn around as one to anxiously watch Adam, Mira, and the drakmir hiding them beneath its wings. Adam finds himself wondering if the two creatures are friends.

Then there's a roar from above them.

His and Mira's drakmir bolts, seemingly on instinct, and Adam can't honestly blame it because he feels that roar in his _bones_. As soon as the sheltering wings are gone Mira throws herself sideways and over Adam, spreading the Icarus shield as she goes.

That might have been enough.

But then Kai throws himself out of the trees and back into the clearing.

Seconds later, Adam sees why.

The dragon's fire forks and forks again and doesn't hit anything. Not any of them, not any of the drakmir- it strikes out wildly and sputters out before connecting with any targets.

Unlike theirs, Kai's drakmir followed him. As Kai skids to a halt beside Adam and Mira, Mira does something that flares the Icarus shield wide over the clearing, reaching into the woods to protect the herd as well.

The dragon hits it with a sound like a falling building. It bellows and wheels away into the sky again, spouting frustrated flames. It dives twice more, claws scrabbling for purchase on the shield and not finding any; after the third dive Kai's drakmir crouches over the humans, wings mantled, and starts roaring back at the dragon.

"Whoa," Mira says, stunned, between roars. "Looks like you made a friend, Kai."

"Yeah, well," Kai pants, still redirecting gouts of flame, though now he's letting the Icarus shield help as well- the fires that do hit it tend to slide off. "We have an agreement. It's 'don't get eaten.'"

Adam snorts despite himself.

"Yeah, well," Mira imitates, sitting up again and offering Adam a hand. "Your friend says to climb on, he's giving us a ride."

Even as a juvenile, the drakmir is large enough for all three of them to climb on between his wings. It's not a quick maneuver but with their shielding they have the time.

"Hold on," Mira yells as they all bury their hands in the grassy mane, careful not to pull.

The drakmir rears, flaps its wings once (nearly buffeting Adam in the head), and bolts.

To Adam's surprise the creature is _fast_. The shield moves with them as they weave through the trees and Adam can see the rest of the herd running to keep up, apparently connecting them with the shield and deciding to stay close.

Kai, hunched closest to the drakmir's head and still spitting sparks, whoops as they pick up speed. When the dragon comes around for another pass, Kai twists his head and breathes fire _back_ at it. 

The dragon startle backwards. The wind kicked up from its sudden backwinging nearly sends everyone tumbling but their drakmir leans into it and puts on another burst of speed.

"Hey Mira, what's our new best friend's name?" Kai yells back, laughing. Adam can't stop staring at him. Like this, lit from within by determination and without by his own flames, he's hard to look away from.

"Ronsen," Mira yells back, delighted. "He said his name was Ronsen."

"Well, Ronsen!" Kai slaps one of their ride's antlers and Ronsen lets out a noise between a whicker and a laugh. "Wanna come with us, buddy?"

They don't need Mira to translate the noise the drakmir makes as agreement.

Eventually the dragon gives up, evidently not willing to risk its wings among the trees. The herd begins to gradually peel off and scatter but their ride shows no sign of slowing, still galloping full out through the forest and now occasionally leaping into the air with slow flaps of its wings- the wings may not be made for true flight, but Ronsen can definitely glide easily over ravines and rivers even with their added weight.

Adam gets the feeling both that the drakmir is enjoying himself and that this wild run is something he hadn't had the chance to do before.  Adam doesn't think it's the sort of thing that _he's_ had a chance to do before. He can't know, but it _feels_ new.

Ronsen finally starts to slow as the sun begins to set, whickering to Mira that he needs to rest. They all slide off with a chorus of thanks when he stops at a pond.

"I cannot believe you breathed fire at a dragon," Adam says as Kai kneels next to the lake and begins gulping water.

"Yeah, that was insanely cool, Kai," Mira says, running a hand through Ronsen's fur as they walk closer to the pond. "What made you do that?"

Kai shrugs, but his face is turning pink. "I was just annoyed that it was breathing fire at my friends. So I did it back."

Adam starts laughing and can't stop. "Kai, that's insane!"

Grinning, Kai says, "I didn't hear any objections."

When it starts to get dark everyone piles back onto Ronsen. They head for the second set of stars, set much lower among the trees, that marks the Aeyrie. The Icarus shield mostly blends into the dark with them but every once in a while light hits it just right to reflect a blue shimmer that makes the dark forest look haunted by will o'the wisps.

Kai and Mira remember extremely conflicting legends about will o'the wisps so they pass the time back to the city trading them back and forth. Adam doesn't really have anything to contribute, but he can't keep himself from smiling fondly as he listens to his friends.

They don't need Ri'ya's help to get into the city this time. Ronsen gathers himself and launches into the trees, scrabbling for purchase in the lower branches before getting the hang of it and leaping and gliding further and further up. When they skid into one of the lower landing platforms people with and without wings go scattering in all directions.

There's a lot of shouting accompanying their wild flight.

Adam glances down and realises what a sight they must make. Riding into the city in the dark on what is, for most intents and purposes, a drake, illuminated by Kai's fire with the Icarus shield glinting around them, Kai and Mira's clothes still flecked with blood while Adam's returned wearing native clothing and new scars- no wonder people are scattering.

Mira raises the Icarus above them with both hands and shouts something in Ri'ya's people's language, musical and demanding at once. She's definitely playing into the dramatic entrance. Adam can't blame her.

When Kai lights up the dark around the Icarus, his fire twists into tiny versions of Ronsen, flying and flickering around the shield and his friends. It's the most delicate control over his fire that Adam's seen yet. The effect is stunning but he's betting Kai can't hold it for long.

Deciding he might as well join in, Adam rises to his feet on Ronsen's back and flips off to land in a crouch in front of them.

"We could always get a job as circus performers," Mira says in their own language without changing her expression and Adam tries not to snort in response.

Their display is effective, though. The townspeople are still giving them a wide berth but Adam sees several runners dispatched and it's not long before he sees Ri'ya and her friends coming to meet them.

Ri'ya looks stunned to see them, wings flaring behind her anxiously. Mira doesn't give up her post on Ronsen to talk to her. The height gives Mira an intimidating advantage and Adam makes sure to move closer and keep his body language threatening, making it unmistakably clear that he's there to guard his friends.

His friends likely don't appreciate him playing guard dog, but they aren't going to contradict him in front of what is beginning to look like all of Aeyrie.

Besides. Adam _wants_ to guard them.

Ri'ya and Mira converse for a long time. Adam settles into a defensive stance. Kai's fire shows no sign of dying down just yet, and one of the fiery drakmir comes to hover just over Adam's shoulder.  The little fire-creature throws intimidating shadows over him and lets him know how Kai is doing at the same time, which he doubts is accidental.

"She thanks us for our service and would like to offer us a reward," Mira announces at last. Adam can't see her from his position, but he can picture the regal toss of her head that likely accompanies that particular tone. "We can have a house in the fifth tier, complete with stabling for Ronsen, and the city of Aeyrie will employ us as mercenaries."

"Is that something we want?" Adam says, keeping his voice low and his eyes forward.

"I think it is," Mira says, carefully not letting her voice change. "But we are booby trapping every room of that house." She pauses. "Also, we're keeping the Icarus shield with us. That, they've already agreed to; apparently the dragon only got it because they kept it at the highest point of the city."

"Oh for-" Kai groans. "First, that was dumb. Second, I just remembered what Icarus refers to and I'll tell you both later, because third, this shield's _name_ is dumb."

"Are we accepting?" Adam says, still not turning.

"Well, I kind of need you both to tell me," Mira says. "Kai?"

"I think we should, yeah." The fire drakmir closest to Adam flicks its wings. "Adam?"

Adam sighs. "I don't like this, for the record. They tricked us, and I don't trust them not to do it again. But... yeah. It'll give us a home base and ready supplies.  And it isn't like we can't just leave later if we need to.  Let's go for it."

"All right," Mira says, then raises her voice and repeats their agreement in ringing tones to the waiting crowd.

Adam's not prepared for the cheering.

Neither is Ronsen, who rears as Adam backs up, both of them startled into action.  Luckily for them red-winged guards start to form a barrier in front of them before either of them can spook too badly. Adam's not thrilled about the red-winged strangers, either, but at least he's confident that they could win against them if it came to a fight.

It doesn't; the guards lead them to the house they've earned on the fifth tier. Adam _thinks_ they offer to fly his group up and Mira refuses.  After what happened last time, they'll stick with Ronsen or with the bridges and ladders.

Somehow, Adam doesn't actually expect a _house_.

He's not sure why not- Ri'ya had _said_ house, Mira had translated it that way. But he still doesn't expect it. He expects another single room in a tree like what they'd had, or a one bedroom place like the apartment, but this is an actual two story home. It's complete with separate rooms, a kitchen and a dining room and even a living room, which seems like a great luxury. Adam's not even sure he remembers what a living room is _for_ anymore.

('Living,' Kai says later, and Mira throws a pillow at him. Kai suggests that's probably not what 'throw pillow' means and she throws another one).

There are separate bedrooms, too, but no one suggests they actually use all of them. Once the red-winged guards have left them to settle in and Ronsen's found himself a place in the attached stable (which looks to be a _very_ hastily converted porch), they start arguing over what bedroom they _should_ use.

"The one in the back left corner," Kai is insisting, stubbornly. "On the second floor."

"The one on the first floor is way more defensible," Mira argues back.

"Yeah, if we want to barricade ourselves _in_ it! I don't want that, Mira, I want as many exits as possible." Kai crosses his arms and glares at the floor. "I don't want to sleep anywhere we can be trapped."

"I'm with Kai," Adam puts in. "I think we've had more than enough of that."

Mira winces and concedes. "Okay, I see your point. I hadn't thought of it like that."

There's only one bed in each room but Adam can fix that quickly. He ends up moving most of the furniture around, in fact, because Mira and Kai take absurd delight in directing him to move increasingly heavier furniture all over the house.  They don't just push all the beds together in one room, they also end up using bookcases and cabinets and dressers to divide and break up the other rooms.

If anyone ever does break in they're going to find themselves slowed down nearly immediately, possibly lost, and definitely unable to get enough clearance to fly.

After they've been at it for a while Adam has become reasonably sure his friends just like watching him carry things bigger than himself. He's not going to object to that.

They make sure to thoroughly hide the Icarus shield while they rearrange the place. It's not quite in the center of the house- that would be too predictable- but it's in the most enclosed, hidden place they can build, a hatch just off the kitchen that Adam and Kai create with fire and strength between them, fire-carving and moving the wood and walls around until the Icarus is safe. Its shield has long since been expanded to cover the whole of Aeyrie.

"You know," Kai says, climbing haphazardly over a bookcase to slide down into the kitchen. "We didn't really think about how _we_ have to get through here."

Adam lifts the bookcase to slip through and sets it back down. It's not necessary or in fact wise to only use one hand for it, but he does it anyway. "I did."

"I think he meant for the rest of us mere mortals," Mira says dryly, already in the kitchen and sitting on the table. She has a bowl in her hands. "They left this place full of food, too. Though I couldn't tell you what, like, any of it is."

"That's alright." Kai jumps onto the table next to her. He nearly misses, but a tiny blast of fire from his feet course-corrects and he lands neatly.

Adam feels his eyebrows fly up. That's a lot more control than he'd have expected Kai to show a day ago. Apparently, running for their lives from another dragon had been good for him in ways Adam never would have guessed.

"It's free food." Kai is already reaching for Mira's bowl. Anticipating him, she switches it to one hand and leans away. "Who cares what kind?"

"I do," Mira tells him. "I care a lot. What if it's, I don't know, drakmir stew?"

Kai shrugs. "It's not Ronsen and _we_ didn't kill it, so we might as well? Not eating it wouldn't make them less dead?"

"I doubt it's drakmir," Adam says wryly. He doesn't join them on the table, content to lean against the door frame and smile at his friend's antics. "Ri'ya and the others looked pretty scared of Ronsen."

"Oh yeah." Mira leans backwards to hold the bowl out of reach as Kai lets out a wordless whine and tries to climb over her for it. "They're not thrilled about him. I don't think they know the drakmir are herbivores."

"Well, I'm not about to tell them," Kai says, finally succeeding in getting the bowl away from Mira by climbing entirely on top of her and reaching as far as he can.

He lets out a loud whine when he realises the bowl is empty. Mira starts to snicker. "It was just apples, Kai, or at least something like them.  We know what apples are. I ate one and put the rest in the pantry before you ever came in here."

Adam blinks at that. "Wait, how long have you been in the kitchen?"

Mira rolls her eyes and gently pushes Kai off of her so that she can sit up. "Since shortly after you two started making that hidey-hatch. You're both ridiculous, you know that?"

"What makes you say that?" Adam says, a touch defensive now.

"Seriously?" Mira slides off the table and stretches. "You were competing. That hatch was done ages before _you_ were."

"We weren't-" Adam starts, and then stops when he thinks about it. "Okay, so maybe we were, a little."

Mira gets a maybe-apple out of the pantry and hands it to Kai, then gets a second one for Adam as Kai starts to eat his so fast Adam is legitimately worried his friend might choke.

"Slow down," he tells Kai. "We have plenty more, and we know where to get food. For that matter, we know how to hunt in the woods; even if these people suddenly decide not to help us we'll be fine."

"They won't, you know," Mira says. "Decide not to help, I mean. We finished the quest, so they're our allies now."

Kai tries to say something with his mouth full. It might be 'you sound confident.' It might not be.

Mira shrugs. "Call it a hunch. I just feel like it's a done deal now, so we might as well enjoy the benefits."

"Yeah, speaking of that, let's go get some rest." Adam hauls Kai carefully up from where he's still sprawled across the table. "I'll take first watch."

Adam's habit of rising with the sun proves to be helpful in the morning when dawn brings loud knocking on their front door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long break, i fell into the miraculous ladybug fandom and i think i live there now! but i do very much plan to continue this.


End file.
